Alphabet of Accessibility for Game Designers

This is a really essential tool for any game developer (indeed, for any product designer) to have and to apply to designing your game.

Alphabet of Accessibility Deck for Game Designers (source:link)

Empathetic, thought provoking, needed to understand who you are designing for and perhaps more importantly who you aren't able to reach.

Persona driven design process

Model users: 'personas'

In following up on the topic of Persona driven design processes, we wanted to highlight that the WCAG Guidelines actually provide example personas for designer. "Stories of Web Users" offer character centred scenarios. While not actual persons nor comprehensively addressing every kind of disability, the characters illustrate and challenge designers to consider users with a range of needs and goals. https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/

Personas offer a cast of synthetic characters complete with values, personal histories, needs and goals. Personas are not average demographic 'types', they are individual characters whose biographical detail allows designers to 'imagine' the persona's individual aspirations, choices and behaviour as realistic, plausible, meaningful. It is simply another way for designers to generate empathy with their users. It enables them to build up a cast of characters, socialised and known among the design team, in order to focus the team's design attention, to enable and contain design ideation, development action, testing, user acceptance, etc.A persona is employed as a shared sense making device, a fictional 'identity' or a character who is imagined in putative roles wherein some future version of the product is employed. These design strategies occupy the conceptual boundary between the design-world and the use-world. Each persona can be used to...

“Develop a precise description of our user and what he wishes to accomplish.” (Cooper, 2004) “Personas are not real people, but they are based on the behaviours and motivations of real people we have observed and represent them throughout the design process. They are composite archetypes based on behavioural data gathered from the many actual users encountered in ethnographic interviews.” (Cooper et al., 2007)

We can use “personas” or special classes of users as representative clients/user/consumers in order to overcome the impossibility of maintaining dialog with each and every participant.

Further reading

For example: Lee, online shopper with color blindness (link)

[Cooper, 2004] Cooper, A. (2004). The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Sams, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

[Cooper et al., 2007] Cooper, A., Reimann, R., and Cronin, D. (2007). About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. John Wiley & Sons, Indianapolis, Indiana.

[Triple U, 2018] Triple U blog (2018). "Accessibility Cards" (link)

Ally for Brightspace

UCD IT Services in partnership with UCD Access and Lifelong Learning have recently purchased Ally which has now been integrated into Brightspace. 

Ally is a content accessibility tool that helps build a more inclusive learning environment and improve the student experience by helping students take clear control of course content with usability, accessibility and quality in mind.

Ally will assist with the University's objective of University for All and assist with the Universal Design principles for Teaching & Learning, providing the student population with alternative options to receive their learning materials.

Ally provides detailed insight and guidance to staff on best practice in relation to the accessibility of their content and guidelines on how best to improve on it.

(From the blurb...)

"
Students and staff now have the facility to view their learning content in different formats. The alternative format options are accessed by clicking on the “Download alternative formats icon” beside the learning content. Some of the alternative formats include:

• Semantic HTML
• ePub
• Audio
• Electronic Braille

A fantastic learning resource "Stark opens its doors to the Public Library"

In what Stark says is the largest, centralised accessibility resource on the internet now including Hannah Milan’s a11yresources, this library has the potential to reshape the future of accessibility education and community.

...with over ~1,000 carefully curated accessibility content aggregated from all over the internet—including articles and tools, to courses and guides and the spectrum of topics from Gaming, Software & Tools, Standards, and more.

https://www.getstark.co/library/