Accessibility in arcade games — an honest audit of our own
Fast, visual games are among the hardest things on the web to make accessible. We went through our own, and the results were mixed.
Most accessibility advice is written for documents: headings, image descriptions, screen readers. A game drawn on a canvas is, to a screen reader, one blank rectangle. So games need different questions, and some of the answers aren't flattering.
What makes the biggest difference
Don't use colour as the only signal. If danger is red and safe is green, roughly one in twelve men will struggle. Adding a shape, an outline, movement or a sound fixes it, and a hazard that's red and spiky and pulsing is easier for everyone to read, not just colour-blind players.
Respect "reduce motion". Phones and computers have a setting for people who get dizzy or sick from movement. A game can't remove the movement that is the game, but screen shake, drifting backgrounds and flashes can go.
Keep controls forgiving. Holding a button for an exact length of time, mashing, or dragging precisely all shut out people with limited movement. A single tap works for far more people.
And make text readable. Text drawn inside a game doesn't grow when you zoom the page, so a small score counter can be unreadable on a laptop.
What we do reasonably well
Most of our games are one button or one thumb, with no timed holds and no mashing. None needs a mouse and keyboard at the same time. No menu has a time limit. You can pinch-zoom every game page. And the pages around the games are normal web pages, so everything about a game works with a screen reader even when the game itself doesn't.
Where we fall short
- Only Castaway honours "reduce motion". The rest still shake and throw particles around. This is the easiest thing on the list to fix.
- There are no colour-blind modes. Sonar gets away with it because it's nearly all one colour. Some others lean on colour more than they should.
- You can't make the text inside a game bigger.
- Sound is atmosphere, not information, so there are no audio cues to replace visual ones.
- Screen readers can't see inside the games at all. That's true of almost every canvas game, but it's still true of ours.
A game made of colour
Huedle is about guessing a colour, and no trick makes that fully work for someone with strong colour blindness. We'd rather say so. What helps is that its clues are arrows and percentages rather than colours, so a good part of it can be solved by reasoning. Making those clearer is on the list.
What's next
In order: "reduce motion" in every game, a pass through each one for anything shown only by colour, bigger HUD text where it's cramped, and clearer number clues in Huedle.
→ Play the games · → Why one-button games are secretly the hardest