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Game accessibility guidelines

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Provide captions or visuals for significant background sounds

I was glad to see the subtitling wasn’t hastily thrown in at the end, that it included those great atmospheric sounds, and actually indicated direction. Those are little touches that make a huge difference to players that need them.
Pyrophex, via Kongregate

Communicating all sound by text is usually neither practical or desirable, but anything that’s important should be. To judge this, consider whether the sound could be totally removed without much impact to story, gameplay or atmosphere. If not, reinforce them with either captions or visuals.

Captions is the name given to subtitles that represent sounds, rather than speech. I.e. solely for accessibility, and not part of localisation work. They are usually delivered through the same mechanism as subtitles, but it should be possible to turn them on or off independently of whether subtitles are turned on or off.

The Last Door provides all speech as text, and then an extra option to represent all important background noises as text. 14% of their players chose to play through to completion with this option chosen.

Best practice example: Portal 2
Best practice example: Even The Ocean
Best practice example: The Last Door

All guidelines

Three cogs, smallest coghighlightedBasic
Three cogs, medium sized cog highlightedIntermediate
Three cogs, largest cog highlightedAdvanced
Three cogs, all  highlightedFull list
ExcelExcel checklist download

Help & advice

How to work with these guidelines

FCC Chairman's Award for Advancement in Accessibility
finalist 2016, tiga games industry awards
DFA foundation best practice award, Horizon Interactive Bronze Winner, 7-128 industry & community leader

About the guidelines

A collaborative effort between a group of studios, specialists and academics, to produce a straightforward developer friendly reference for ways to avoid unnecessarily excluding players, and ensure that games are just as fun for as wide a range of people as possible.

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