Harriet Frayling

Mobile Games: When Approachability Rhymes with Accessibility

This talk explores how mobile games often excel at approachability but often miss accessibility, which excludes disabled players. Discover the meaningful overlap: customizable controls help both casual players and those with motor impairments, clear audio/visual cues serve new players and those with various disabilities from cognitive to visual and hearing. See how you can properly support OS-level accessibility settings like screen readers and text scaling, while also designing accessible mobile gaming experiences through inclusive design and accessibility-aware development in commonly used engines. Learn from expert game accessibility specialists Cari Watterton (Scopely) and Améliane F. Chiasson (Player Research) and make your next mobile game (or patch!) more accessible.

Session Takeaway

• Learn how to make your mobile game reach a wider audience of people who use mobile devices daily for their accessibility needs.
• Know how to leverage and efficiently support iOS and Android's accessibility settings.
• Learn how to cleverly align accessibility efforts with your goals and objectives.
• Get tips on how to prevent accessibility barriers at the design level to avoid needing to do extra work.

Session speakers

Making the Case for Accessibility - Roundtable

If you’re a dev who wants to make your game more accessible, but are constantly struggling to get the greenlight - this session is for you.

Our roundtable brings together accessibility specialists working in studios and a former director who successfully established a dedicated accessibility role to give insights on how to get buy-in for accessibility at your studio. We’ll provide a safe space to discuss the challenges of achieving buy-in and explore strategies for making a business case for accessibility. We’ll also share resources, data and help foster connections with the accessibility community that you can take away to help you going forward.

This roundtable aims to be accessible and approachable for everyone, from juniors to directors. We welcome accessibility consultants and lived experience experts to bring their experience to the table and learn more about the challenges developers face in making accessibility a priority.

Alongside Cari, our moderators are:

Robert Macdonald, a UI/UX veteran with over 21 years of experience in game development, most recently serving as Studio UI/UX Director at Splash Damage, where he oversaw UI, UX, and accessibility across multiple projects. His credits include Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Gears Tactics, Gears of War 4 and Batman: Arkham Origins, spanning multiple platforms and genres. An advocate for inclusive design, he led studio-wide accessibility initiatives, including creating and recruiting for Splash Damage’s first dedicated accessibility role and helping embed accessibility into development culture and production practices.

Harriet Frayling, Senior Accessibility Specialist at Many Cats Studios. Harriet has spent 8+ years providing technical accessibility and inclusive design guidance, workshops and talks to studios, publishers and communities. Drawing on her lived experience as a disabled professional, and her expertise as an award winning accessibility consultant, she has helped numerous teams from AAA to Indie navigate the complexities of game accessibility, delivering expert accessibility consultation, research, analysis, testing and process development.

Session Takeaway

• Space to discuss challenges with getting buy-in for accessibility.

• Insights from industry veterans on making a business case for accessibility.

• Resources, data, and connections with the accessibility community.

Session speakers