Accesibility Resources

Various resources, charities, organizations and assets can be found here to help with accessibility efforts.

The AbleGamers Foundation and Charity has served more than 56 million members of the disabled community according to their website. The AbleGamers mission statement is to bring awareness and broaden the range of video games for the disabled. The five pillars that they focus on to help players connect with others, build communities, and combat social isolation include peer counseling, engineering research, community development, user research and professional development. Their website includes many resources avaliable including a book called Includification: A Practical Guide to Game Accessibility that helps developers when creating their games. The link to their site can be found here!

Microsoft is a big advocate for accessibility and provides many resources for developers and individuals wanting to learn more about accomodating not only in video games, but technology in general. In their article “Making Games Accessible”, Microsoft encourages game developers, designers, and producers to make video games more accessible for everyone. They believe it is important to make gaming accessible for everyone. Additionally, they provided support for how to make your websites accessible in ASP.NET which I utilized for my site. Last but not least, Microsoft has introduced a free course avaliable on their MSLearn site named the Gaming Accessibility Fundamentals Learning Path. In this course, developers can learn and prove out their knowledge of accessibility through various modules. Microsoft’s main goal through this course and their various accessibility features and updates is to bridge the disability divide between players and developers. They believe that in order for gaming to be welcoming and fun for everyone, that customization should be put first for the player.

An additional resource that can help developers is a website called W3 Schools. This site contains many web resources and tutorials for developers to help with various programming languages such as HTML, Java, C++ and many more that are widely used in the gaming industry. Additionally, accessibility resources are avaliable to use as reference and they even offer an introductory course found here. If you are a developer who hasn't used this site or are curious and want to learn software development, I highly recommend this site.