**4.3 Accessibility: how the Learning Games Lab helps people use and enjoy its products**

Making our products accessible is a **primary design consideration** for our studio. We strive to make our products as accessible as possible, knowing that we will have to make some compromises, and may fall short in some areas. Our efforts recognize that:

• Accessibility is not just for a set group of users: **all users fall somewhere on a continuum of need** (permanent, temporary, situational). Accessibility is about user needs, and accessible features must be actively designed during the design process.

	- **Visual needs**: the person has a certain degree of vision loss, such as low vision, legal blindness, complete blindness, color blindness. This means our products should be reviewed for contrast, color and on-screen text or visual cues — providing alternatives for users.
	- **Hearing needs**: the person has a certain degree of loss in the ability to hear, either from one or both ears, such as deafness, hearing loss, or hard hearing. This is met by offering captioning of both spoken text and other audible cues.
	- **Cognitive needs**: the person has a mental or psychological disorder, which causes a deficit in the ability to learn, process or remember information, communicate, make social interaction, and make decisions. This type of disability can be a learning disability, intellectual disability, or a specific cognitive ability (e.g., memory, language processing). Includes developmental disabilities (e.g., dyslexia, dyscalculia), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Alzheimer or senility because of aging, people with autism, Down syndrome, and other mental retardation. Some people with cognitive issues need information in literal language comprehension. Their thinking is more concrete, rather than abstract. We address this in a wide variety of ways, including design which offers explicit cues and expectations to guide users with cognitive needs.
	- **Motor needs**: the person has a limitation or a loss in the mobility function and muscle control, such as arthritis, paralysis, repetitive stress injury, neurological disorders, age related issues, lack of mobility, lack of steadiness, or cerebral palsy. We address this by developing resources with interfaces which can easily be mapped to alternative controllers.
	- **Design for accessibility and diversity from the beginning:** Make accessibility and diversity discussions and decisions part of the entire design and development process. Instead of something extra, think with your team about ways to improve players' learning experience by improvising accessibility needs.

*Developing Inclusive Games: Design Frameworks for Accessibility and Diversity DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108456*


basic features to make standard in your games, for example, the use of appropriate fonts, text size, checking color for contrast and color blindness, and subtitles. Once you have some standard, start planning ways to get more accessibility features into your games, in terms of what your team needs to learn or what technical support is needed for that.



**Figure 4.**

*Recommendations for design teams - flowchart.*

far to others. Conference workshops or other teaching opportunities allow your team to reflect about your process and also receive feedback on it. In **Figure 4** we provide a visual summary of the recommendations outlined in this study.
