Can we reduce the cost of accessible serious games?
Percentage of world population with any sort of disability. Source: World Health Organization
Beyond any doubt, video games play a very important role in digital entertainment today, and increasingly in other fields such as education. However, the number of digital games that include accessibility features is still limited, leaving people with disabilities aside from digital gameplay. There might be some who argues that this is not a relevant problem; after all, it affects a minority of the population. But that’s not the case: according to the World Health Organization, up to 15% of the world population has some sort of disability. That’s why we started working on improving the accessibility of serious games (a.k.a. educational) long time ago. After all, education is a universal right, and no one can be left behind!
So, why seems the videogame industry to leave people with disabilities unattended? We believe this is partly due to the high extra cost that this entails for developers. To make a videogame fully accessible it is necessary to produce new functionalities (e.g. text-to-speech support), new content (e.g. adapted versions of the graphics) and also, to do tons of new testing.