“Given a developer's willingness to try, I believe we can make any genre of game accessible.”
BRANDON COLE, ACCESSIBILITY CONSULTANT, AQUENT GAMES
Bloomberg recently featured Aquent Games consultant, Brandon Cole, in a segment dedicated to equality and the bottom line impact to businesses’ diversity. Brandon, who is completely blind, says he first works with studios to convince them that their game can and should be made accessible to the visually impaired. Then, he helps them make their games fully accessible, even to the totally blind. He said a recent career highlight was working for three years on a very popular title called, The Last of Us 2, to make it fully accessible. Brandon says one of the key principles guiding the development of games for the visually impaired are UI narration. That is, every text element of the game needs to be accessible to the blind via either text-to-speech narration or human voice narration. Another key element is audio cues to help guide players around to specific locations. According to Brandon, adding accessibility to a game makes it future proof because the game is made accessible for people who may develop disabilities as they age.
This article originally appeared on Bloomberg.
