Teaching Accessibility Through Games

by Andrew Nejes, Summer 2025

Overview:

What I have done this summer was build a game to help teach accessibility, and I also presented my findings in the way of improving accessibility in a role playing game. This includes improvising with a game engine to try and make a game variety that is traditionally inaccessible to a game that is accessible

Why Make a Game?

Games are an outlet for social interaction be it in an arcade or online in addition to most games being Entertaining to play. On the other hand, Edutainment games are some of the more popular formats to teach wider concepts to people. So, why not build a game that could be in an arcade which is engaging and could teach accessibility?

Image of the accessibility maze title screen including an enter button to start the game and copyright information for the game. Which is as follows: This Open Educational Resource (OER) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. ©The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, Toronto Metropolitan University

Looking to past games

In doing this, I started by looking for games which have taught accessibility concepts in the past. These games usually were backed by colleges and universities during their development.

Accessibility Maze was one of the first games I played which taught how difficult it was to not have access to a mouse when navigating a website, almost all interactions with that game were through the tab key, arrow keys and enter key. This game influenced the top down perspective of the game I ended up making as well as taught concepts that I decided to not retread in my game outside of alternative text.

GATE was a game which was once accessible on what is a currently defunct domain as of the time of writing 7/31/2025 done as part of the Game Accessibility project which used a Unity engine to develop a game showing a 3D environment which reflected various concepts of the WCAG guidelines such as flashing light controls, having ordering which makes sense, each level and room taught a different aspect through an escape room type environment.

A screenshot of the first level of the developed game where the player is moving the character in the traditional play mode.

Development of the Game

Development of the game went through two different engines. We realized our game would not work for Makecode Arcade, a block based engine made by Microsoft. When this failed we moved onto RPG Maker MV and set up three different puzzle types. The first one being a simple word unscramble which was to represent one way fonts and dyslexia could work. As I continued to work on the game, two new puzzles were created, puzzles which needed the assistance of a contrast altering item and another which required the use of an in-game equivalent of alternative text. Further details can be found in the Game Design Document.

Image of the Game in Visual novel mode with a menu showing 5 options, Paper, Letter, Box, Book, and Ladder. Additionally there is a prompt at the bottom saying where would you like to go?

Accessibility Features of the Game

Sound-based location cues
Simulated in-game alt text
Screen reader support
1. NVDA
2. Windows Narrator
High-contrast images
Guided playthrough mode
1. This game mode is more of an entry to video games mode for ease of access and for a more structured playthrough
Keyboard-based text entry
1. The in engine version of text entry is not screen reader compatible, so we had to find a plugin for keyboard based text to be possible

Image of a scrambled word with lower contrast, the text being iwen

Image of a scrambled word with higher contrast, the text being iwen

Getting Feedback

As of right now, the game has not gotten much feedback from the public. However during development there were questions about choices made during development, bug fixes, and how to better emphasize some of the points being taught ingame such as linking towards external resources.

Reflection

Creating a game in a traditionally inaccessible medium revealed the challenges developers face when building accessible experiences. From selecting the engine to integrating accessibility plugins, the process offered valuable insights into inclusive game design.

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