There are plenty of reasons why people don't play certain video games. Some might find them too hard. Others simply find them too boring, or just not fun. But for millions of disabled people, playing games isn't a matter of wanting to, but being able to.

Stephanie Walker encountered this problem first-hand one Friday evening in 2004, when she found herself unable to log in for a regular gaming session with a long-time gaming partner, Mark Barlet. The multiple sclerosis that Walker had contracted in 2001 had finally cost her the use of her right hand, making mouse-and-keyboard gaming a physical impossibility. "I freaked out that this disability was going to take away something that we loved, so we started looking for resources," Barlet recalled in an interview with Ars Technica. "We did not find anything, so she and I took it on ourselves to create it."

Since then, the non-profit AbleGamers Foundation that Barlet and Walker set up has helped educate the public and the game industry about issues related to disabled gamers. The group has spread its message by attending conferences, hosting "accessibility arcades" where disabled gamers can try out games designed for them, and reviewing games specifically for their accessibility levels. But the recently published Includification: A Practical Guide to Game Accessibility might represent the group's most comprehensive and impactful tool in its continuing efforts to help the industry provide better support for the disabled community.

Barlet, who serves as AbleGamers' president, says that a few simple design tweaks—subtitles, colorblind options, and re-mappable keys—are enough to capture "a large segment of the [disabled] market." Those features aren't enough to provide universal accessibility, though. The Includification guidelines, which took a full year to compile, include design practices aimed at gamers with four major types of disabilities: mobility, hearing, vision, and cognitive impairment. For each category, the guidelines range from an easy-to-implement Level 1 baseline (the ability to change font sizes for those with impaired vision, for instance) to Level 3 best practices (having the game read on-screen text out loud to blind gamers). The document also includes special guidelines for mobile games and plenty of concrete examples of how certain games have solved accessibility problems, alongside testimonials from developers and industry veterans.

Even without these specific guidelines in hand, Barlet said the industry has generally been very receptive to AbleGamers' education efforts, and enthusiastic to try to implement the kinds of changes they've been advocating. "The question [has] shifted from 'why they should do it,' to 'how do we do it,'" Barlet said. "We're hoping that this document serves as a reference guide for all developers and publishers to look to while designing the games instead of us catching them, often after the fact, at the limited number of conferences we can attend or board meetings we can make."

Why disabled gamers get left out

Barlet specifically cited EA and Popcap as publishers that have done a good job of including accessibility standards in their games. While Barlet didn't want to call out any of the worst-performing companies in our interview, games like Bethesda's Skyrim, Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption, and Ubisoft's Farcry 2 were among the lowest-rated games in their website's accessibility reviews section (though EA's Battlefield 3 also scored very low, showing that even the best publishers still have gaps in their accessibility record).

When games like these end up neglecting disabled gamers, AbleGamers' editor-in-chief Steve Spohn says the reason usually isn't malice but simply ignorance or obliviousness. He tells the story of a meeting he had with a Blizzard developer where he suggested, among other things, that the developer add a colorblind mode with some sort of marker to differentiate items of different colors. "You know, I’m colorblind and I never thought of that," Spohn recalls the developer saying.

"It was at that point that [Barlet] and I realized how strange the development world really is," Spohn told Ars. "We have developers who need these accessibility options and they don’t even think about them because they’re so used to dealing with everyday situations. It's just the norm to them. But we need to get developers advocating for their own disabilities as well as everyone else’s."

Other times, support for disabled gamers gets left out of games because of financial concerns. Faced with tight deadlines and shoestring budgets, Barlet said, even well-meaning developers can end up pushing accessibility options off the back of their "to-do" lists, in favor of putting development resources out there. "We need to let developers know accessibility options are important for their bottom line," Barlet said. "Here you have a market of gamers saying, 'We will give you our money if you just add options that let us play.' Publishers need to realize more than 33 million gamers are potentially left on the table every time they cut accessibility options for the sake of meeting the deadline."

Even when awareness and money aren't concerns, though, Spohn and Barlet say that some developers are resistant to their efforts out of a sense of "fair play." Many of AbleGamers' accessibility guidelines focus on including options that make the game easier to play for players that have motor-skill or cognitive impairments. This includes features like aim and steering assist, relaxed timing requirements, one-button control, hints for difficult puzzles, or even an "auto-pass" system that lets players skip difficult sections entirely (a feature Nintendo helped legitimize starting with New Super Mario Bros. Wii's "Super Guide").

"Quite frankly we still receive a fair amount of pushback from developers concerning fears [that] implementing these options will somehow ruin their game," Spohn said. But he was adamant that making a game accessible for disabled gamers doesn't have to mean making it too easy or dumbing it down for others. "If the concern is getting achievements in modes that allow easier play, turn off the achievements or scale them down. If the concern is giving out rewards, scale them down. If the concern is that other gamers who do not need the accessibility options will use them to complete the game, make sure to reward players on a sliding scale that benefits players for going through the most difficult version of the game possible."

Hopefully, AbleGamers' new guidelines will help developers get over the issues that prevent their games from being playable by everyone, regardless of their physical or mental abilities.