Pokémon Go is a craze which is currently taking the world by storm, recently passing 50 million downloads on the App store and making millions of people leave their homes in search of rare Pokémon, making them more social in the process. However, there are certain groups of people who are excluded from this phenomenon.

Because of the way some of the game mechanics work and the way it was programmed, the built-in software to read the screens of the iOS and Android operating systems to aid people with disabilities is not able to recognize the text being displayed in the game. There are also some mechanics, such as catching the Pokémon which require you to know where the creature is visually on the screen which would need additional audio queues. The American Foundation Of The Blind has written a detailed blog post explaining what changes need to be done to make the game playable at this link:

http://www.afb.org/blog/afb-blog/pokemon-go-letandrsquos-catch-andrsquoem-all/12



With these few enhancements Pokemon Go could gain a whole new base of players. To this date, not a single Pokemon game has been fully playable without asking someone for help or using text guides. Finally, both Sony and Microsoft started making their consoles speak displayed text and Nintendo is the only company that has not implemented any accessibility features and now is the time for this to change. Companies like Apple and Google (and Niantic being a former Google company should know this), are making it increasingly easier for developers to make assistive technologies like screen readers and magnifiers work well with their applications and games.

We think that Niantic and Nintendo should set an example and do something that no AAA developer has tried before and make Pokemon go Playable by all! There’s no reason why visually impaired people shouldn’t be able to be a part of this massive community and make friends with other gamers.