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General Summary

• Feel free to collaborate on this project
  • Join us in the github discussions, fork the repository and then make a pull request, or message us at [email protected]
• This project focuses on anyone who identifies as disabled or having a disability
• Game accessibility is about removing barriers that prevent people from fully interacting with your game
  • Your creative vision won't be for everyone, but should be available to anyone who wants to experience it
  • Disability is a wide and varied human experience

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Welcome to the unity-accessibility wiki!

We are an open-source collection of accessibility features and tutorials. We are always looking for new collaborators, features, and types of accessibility. Want to contribute? Join us in the github discussions, fork the repository and then make a pull request, or message us at [email protected]! Accessibility and disability can be a very personal topic, so respect is paramount.

If any of our files are not accessible, please let us know and we will fix it!

What is disability?

There are several models of disability, ranging from the social model to the medical model to the human rights model. But who really counts as disabled? For our project, we focus on anyone who identifies as disabled or having a disability. This can include anyone from people with mental illnesses to wheelchair users to people with chronic illnesses. Of course, just because someone can identify as having a disability, does not mean they have to.

Is this the correct model of disability? Of course not! There is no correct model. But it is the model we will be using.

We want to help anyone and everyone play games, and do not feel like it is our place to decide who actually needs or deserves help. That being said, the disability community is our priority. Why? Because we (the developers) have disabilities or chronic conditions that need accommodations often ignored.

What is accessibility and how does it apply to games?

An easy example of accessibility is elevators. Elevators allow wheelchair users or people who have difficulty climbing stairs to access everything located above the first floor. Of course, elevators don't just help people with disabilities. It allows everyone easier access to multi-floor buildings. Game accessibility is about removing barriers that prevent people from fully interacting with your game. These barriers can be physical, emotional, or cognitive.

Your game won't be for everyone. If you want your game to be a stressful, fast paced, and key smashing adventure, it may not be accessible to people with slower reaction times or difficulties pressing keys. But that does not mean it shouldn't be accessible to people with epilepsy, people with color-blindness, people with low vision, or Deaf/Hard of Hearing people. On the opposite side of things, if you want your game to be an intense visual and auditory experience, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be accessible to users with arthritis, motor disabilities, cognitive disabilities, or intellectual disabilities.

In our project, accessibility is tied to disability. We are working to make games accessible to the disability community by writing tutorials and making accessibility features open source. Some of our current sections include: motor accessibility, visual accessibility, hearing accessibility, mental health accessibility, and writing characters with disabilities.

All of our sections focus on the diversity of the disabled experience and user customization. Disability is not a monolith, so allowing users to customize as much as possible is important. That being said, we recommend having certain modes to simplify the initial menu and then all options in an advanced menu. For example, a dyslexia friendly mode may be changing the font to Open Dyslexic and text size to 125%. But that doesn't work for all people with dyslexia, so being able to have more font and size options would be essential.