Advancing Accessibility

How we get involved

Accessibility means deliberately designing games to include disabled players.  Wherever you’re starting in your accessible game development journey, Player Research can help you design, test and include accessibility.

We’ll help you collaborate with disabled players, and work with our expert accessibility team: empowering you to develop accessible and inclusive titles with confidence.

 

Accessibility Training & Guest Speaking

Training courses and guest lectures for gamedev professionals. From ‘Accessibility 101‘ to advanced topics including development strategy and budgeting, for a general audience.

We also host discipline-specific sessions including training for Community Managers and marketing teams to produce accessible social media content, and accessibility-specific skills workshops for Games User Researchers.

Meet our Games Accessibility Lead Améliane F. Chiasson.

Accessibility Strategy Workshops

Interactive workshops that collaboratively build accessibility strategies for game projects, at any scale.

We’ll work through your product risks, accessibility goals and accessibility budgets together, to design a production roadmap. Suitable for games in any production phase: pre-prod, early/late production, or post-launch accessibility patching.

Research with Disabled Players

Player Research’s world-class playtesting capabilities, focused on disabled players. Understand the needs and expectations of your disabled audience. Drive iterative design and development, toward inclusive and accessible games. Our exclusive panel of disabled players allows us to secure essential feedback on specific features, genres, devices and needs.

Our purpose-built accessible playtesting facilities offer a welcoming, secure and productive space for everyone. Learn more about our facilities.

A collage of three disabled players in Player Research's playtest lab

Accessibility SMEs

Benefit from access to our network of trusted accessibility consultants. Our diverse range of partners offer subject matter expertise, including specific accessibility needs, technical implementation, accessible design consultancy, advocacy, training and evangelism, sensitivity reading, and more.

Whether you’re seeking speakers for an internal advocacy day, or perhaps support with a game design challenge, or an accessible secure location for consultation, Player Research will provide valuable operational support and connections.

Are you an experienced accessibility consultant wanting to work with game studios?  Get in contact below to learn more.

 

“We want Control to be loved by as many players as possible. Player Research’s studies and our internal playtesting helped Remedy to remove barriers to play, for example, for players with colour-blindness.”

Elise Torfs, User Research Manager at Remedy Entertainment

Accessibility Quality Assurance

Introducing AQA: our unique accessibility auditing service, powered by Keywords' global quality assurance.

AQA extends the reach of other QA disciplines (CQA, TQA, LQA, FQA) to include our accessibility certification.

Our auditing process covers first-party platform requirements, store tags, industry gold-standard accessibility features, and design considerations.

Keywords’ AQA services were built by and for game developers, with the support of disabled players and accessibility consultants.

Secure frequent accessibility feedback and guidance, empowering your design and engineering teams with routine evaluation that supports rapid iterative design. Detailed test reports isolate specific accessibility barriers and test case failures, with assigned severity labels to help teams prioritise their response.

In partnership with Keywords’ world-class game testing capability, AQA offers both one-off audits and embedded Cycle Testing services.

Accessible Content Creation Partnership

Bring your game and its marketing to a wider audience by partnering with specialists in the Keywords Studios group.

Work with our Keywords content creation specialists to commission accessible game trailers, co-develop accessibility features, engineer accessible UI/UX, add audio description, sign language interpretation, and so much more.

Descriptive Video Works

Providing world-class audio descriptions for games, TV, movies, social media and advertising. Combining specialist AD writers, narrators, and recording capabilities to deliver enthralling and expressive realisations of visual content for blind & low vision players.

Find out more about Descriptive Video Works

Climax Studios

Thirty-year development veterans delivering innovative, creative projects spanning AAA and indie. Their vast experience in industry-leading co-dev includes accessibility-focused technical problem-solving and turnkey co-dev of accessibility features.

Find out more about Climax Studios

TrailerFarm

Crafting multi-award winning creative campaigns that engage millions of players every year. With support from Descriptive Video Works and Player Research, your TrailerFarm content reaches a diverse audience, leveraging high-quality closed captions and audio descriptions.

Find out more about TrailerFarm

Mighty Games

Mighty Games’ range of QA automation services uses an automated build pipeline and AI technology deployed on multiple machines to automatically test code, detect bugs, and report errors on a 24/7 basis.

Find out more about Mighty Games

“Knowing that there is a service out there that is going to be there for us is reassuring because it always feels like you have to fight just to be acknowledged.”

Radderss, disabled creator & consultant

Are you a games accessibility specialist?

If you’re an accessibility consultant with expertise and experience in the field, a disabled content creator or an organisation that wants to improve accessibility standards and inclusivity in gaming, we want to hear from you, so we can collaborate on future projects where you’ll be paid fairly and on time.

By listening to the diverse, lived experience of the accessibility gaming community – and working with them – we help studios and publishers proactively develop accessible experiences, for every player.

Player Research offers professional support to help you interact with games studios securely and professionally.

Register here to learn more.

Are you a player with accessibility needs?

We always welcome people from all backgrounds, levels of ability and gaming experiences to playtest with us, so we can represent the diversity of players across the world and support the development of accessible games.

Sign up to our list for a chance to play unreleased games at one of our labs, give feedback, and be compensated for your time. We hope to see you in one of our labs soon.

Sign up to playtest

Case studies

Returnal

Climax Studios supports the accessible development of Returnal.

Find out more about Returnal

The Last of Us

Descriptive Video Works implements cutscene audio descriptions for The Last of Us Part I.

Find out more about The Last of Us

Get in touch so we can meet you where you’re at on your journey, advancing accessibility in gaming together.

Get in touch