E is for Everyone

 A couple of years ago,  I was invited to a school in Long Island through a class I was taking at NYU at the time. This remarkable school caters to about two hundred children and teens with various disabilities, and masterfully guides them through a typical k-12 curriculum.

Having no prior exposure to people with disabilities, I was amazed to learn that many of the school's students do not play computer games. The school's therapists explained that even the slightest disability can render most video games inaccessible. As someone who grew up playing video games with friends after school, I can personally attest to the wonderful advantages of the medium: team work, competition, independent problem solving, and the overall empowerment and creativity that it inspires. For all of these reasons and more, what I've seen that day in Long Island was unnerving on a very personal level.

   Returning home from this encounter, I wanted to understand the reasons behind the utter inaccessibility of one of today's largest industries. I wanted to know if these problems are solvable, and at what price. It seamed to me that software should be much more flexible to adopt than say - a playground made of steel pipes. As such, this medium carries the potential to allow children with disabilities to play and compete in the same 'playground' and on equal terms to their typical peers. Perhaps video games could even offer a replacement for typical play activities that would never become available to some children.

So why aren't games more accessible? Is it just lack of knowledge on part of designers, is it just too hard or costly to implement?

   Reading about it could only get me so far, so I set on a mission to create an accessible game myself - one that would be playable by everyone at the school. This would mean to find a way to accommodate a wide array of physical and cognitive challenges for the children. Would such a thing be possible, or are video games just too complex of a medium to be made accessible? To share my experience, you can download the chapter here.