Making video games accessible to the widest possible audience takes more than a checklist of cursory options embedded in player menus. Accessibility is not the sole responsibility of interaction designers and front-end engineers but a mindset best championed by every contributor throughout the development of a game.
As a mindset, accessibility asks audio, visual, and programming pros alike to anticipate and preempt product shortcomings that deprive players of necessary information in the conquering of our creations.
In our own role as technical sound designers, we’re faced with not only making sure the right auditory solutions are present, but also that those solutions are implemented in a way that ensures a game’s sound works its hardest for all gamers and in all game environments via an adaptive audio mix.
For accessibility to be embedded at a game’s core, it’s essential for audio teams like ours to be involved early and maintain close collaboration with our visual and programming counterparts. Together, we can bolster inclusive game design with adaptive audio solutions throughout the duration of development instead of making do with the minimum during late-stage audio implementation.
Here are a few lessons that accessibility-minded sound designers and engineers can bring to the table through early and consistent collaboration.
1. Systematize Audio From the Start
A good game audio mix begins with strong audio systemization (an organizing principle that helps categorize and connect, i.e., bus, related audio assets for smarter in-engine processing).
By involving technical sound designers early in development, sound design and implementation teams can better anticipate and make proactive decisions around the role that audio plays in a game’s presentation with adaptability and accessibility top of mind. Respect for what players need to know most helps us prioritize which sounds exist in the foreground, middle ground, and background of any soundscape, as well as allowing elements to shift dynamically between these layers as seems fit.
The earlier these decisions are made to distinguish audio categories and how they relate to player priorities, the more energy a technical sound designer can devote to ensuring a powerfully dynamic mix. Strong upfront categorization of audio helps developers define which elements are mission-critical and which are optional to the core gameplay experience. This ultimately makes it easier to offer players a broader range of baked-in audio options to define what accessibility means to them.
Building for accessibility sometimes means trimming the fluff, and early systemization helps ensure the most essential sounds persist when players opt to cut back on overstimulating nonessentials (e.g., ambients, environmentals, and first-party character sounds). For instance, the sound of character clothing in a first-person shooter is far less informative to the gameplay than the sounds of target movement, shot connection, or an empty ammo cartridge needing reload.
Early and consistent systemization has huge benefits for team collaboration as well. As technical sound designers begin to establish consistencies for categories across the audio mix, they can work closely with sound designers, music, and voice to fine tune specs of those teams’ file outputs for smoother implementation.
2. If Everything is Loud, Nothing Is
No one enjoys when critical voice lines get drowned out by music or sound effects. As such, volume plays a huge role in creating a dynamic and accessible mix. It’s not simply a matter of close means loud and quiet means far — it’s a far greater matter of what has the most value to advancing the objectives of the game at any given moment.
To avoid a muddy mix where sounds share too much overlap in volume or frequency, it’s helpful to organize audio across a range of several loudness bands: loudest, loud, medium, quiet and quietest. Anything meant to give immediate feedback to players will likely trend toward the louder bands, with the loudest reserved for energizing elements, like the bright, intermittent bursts of magical spells or a checkpoint cue. Anything systematized into the quieter bands then makes for easy optional cutbacks in game settings for players seeking less stimulus, less frills, or a purely feedback-oriented soundscape.
If accessibility for a player means cutting out everything but the essentials, in exchange this provides for more breathing room in the mix’s dynamic range. With more space for audio to breathe when players elect for fewer effects, sound designers have room to redistribute high-value sounds across loudness bands for even less muddiness in the mix.
3. Champion the “Second Channel”
In the absence of smell-o-vision and TV you can taste, video games must rely on a combination of sight, sound, and touch to engage their players.
One key principle of accessibility that all game contributors can easily uphold is the presence of a “second channel.” This means meeting the sensory needs of at least two game senses for anything essential to players’ operation or progression of a game. This helps ensure there is an alternate source of feedback should any one sense be a player’s impairment.
If any core gameplay information is found by any collaborator to be conveyed only through one sense, the need for a supporting sense should be brought to the attention of the team at large. For example, if a player must find a key item to fulfill a quest, it’s helpful to reinforce the often-used visual glow with either an audio or haptic cue that lets players know they are nearing their objective. This not only supports gamers with vision impairment. It helps all players reorient toward their goal, even if the glowing indicator simply sits outside of their camera’s field of vision.
Vigilance around second channel delivery is a great motivator for collaboration as a game’s pieces fall into place and important elements constrained to a single channel are uncovered, inspiring further creativity to deliver additional sensory support.
4. Variation is Vital
Our view on accessibility extends also to the diversity of a game’s soundscape. Repetitive sounds and tight audio loops can be a source for fatigue for all players, not just those with heightened sensitivity. Yet, even games with a limited asset library can achieve a broad range of audio expression through smart implementation.
Sounds with a consistent presence, such as background ambients or traversal sounds, can be processed more effectively with slight pitch oscillation or sequence randomization in-engine, preventing players from noticing any distracting or inorganic patterns, especially when they find themselves in a tight gameplay loop.
The challenge of this subtle variation is often that developers aren’t planning for or implementing this conscious approach early enough in development, leaving little time for audio teams to deliver variation at launch.
Accessibility Benefits All
We are driven for more adaptive, accessible audio in gaming not only because it leads to stronger, gamer-centric audio design but because it rewards all gamers with more means to play the way they play best.
Game accessibility is more easily achieved when contributors across all developer departments have a sense for accessible shortcomings and can raise concerns early to collaborate on suitable solutions. The greatest audio solutions could even be inspired by the words of a wary programmer or art director! If we’re to have our player’s backs, we’ve got to have each other’s, after all.