Media and Gaming Accessibility

Good afternoon.

My name is Gregory Hughes and I'm really excited to have the opportunity to speak to you today about a super important and interesting topic. The accessibility of media and games.

At Apple, we strive to surprise and delight all of our customers regardless of their abilities and disabilities.

We envision a world where users like Patrick are able to do what they love and love what they do, without being hindered by technology.

We want to make sure that users with disabilities can experience the same surprise, delight, magic moments and most importantly fun when using our devices.

As part of that vision, your apps play a key role.

You play such an important part in helping us to deliver an inclusive, accessible and fun platform for all of our users.

During our conversations today, we're going to be talking about four categories of disabilities.

Visual disabilities, which are those pertaining to sight.

How much a user can see, in some cases, the users that can't see.

Motor disabilities, which are disabilities pertaining to how a user interacts physically with the device, whether they can hold the device at all, how to use a keyboard or mouse.

Hearing disabilities, which are those pertaining to how much somebody can hear and in some cases the complete inability to hear.

And lastly, disabilities related to cognition.

And these are displays that affect how somebody thinks when using your game.

How much they can remember from the original instructions you gave them.

Or what type of UI works best for them.

So, while talking about these disabilities, today we're going to break everything down into three key sections. First, I'm going to present how to make your media and videos more accessible in your applications.

We'll then build on some of those topics and talk about how to make your games more accessible. How do you think about accessible design in gaming.

And this is really interesting. As we talk about this, it's really easy to sit back and say, "My game can't be made accessible." And one thought experiment that we often go through is let's start from a point where we think it can be done.

Let's assume that somebody that's blind can use my video editing app, or somebody with cerebral palsy can play my first-person shooter game.

The challenge and the fun part is then figuring out how that can be done.

And so, try to keep that in mind as we're going through some of these specific cases and general cases for adding accessibility to your games.

And then last, we're going to show a demo game that we made, that highlights some of these accessible design concepts.

And we'll give you some ideas on how you can implement them in your own app.

So, first, the accessibility of media and video.

And generally, the most straightforward one that people think about is the accessibility of images.

And anyone that's worked in accessible design will always say, always add alt text.

But it's not quite that simple in all cases.

For example, if we take a look at this image on the screen.

You might describe this as "Woman sitting in a hammock playing a guitar." An equally good description might be "Person playing guitar with custom artwork drawn using a marker." Equally, you could describe this as "Image demonstrating the use of the camera's aperture to make the foreground blurry while keeping the subject in focus." So, the important part when trying to describe your images, trying to populate that alt text, is thinking about how this image is used in your application.

What's the context for the image and what's it conveying to the user? Once you can think about that, you can then create a really good, clear and concise description for users that might not be able to see the image.

So, for images we always want developers to think about clear, concise descriptions that convey the same information that somebody, that a sighted user market get.

For audio, we're generally thinking about disabilities pertaining to hearing.

How does somebody that can't hear, or has difficulty hearing perceive the audio in your application? For audio, there are generally two categories of audio that we see in apps.

The first is spoken audio.

And this could be something like a recording of the "I Have a Dream" speech.

Or it could be a podcast that you play back in your app.

But regardless, when dealing with spoken audio you want to think about in the context of your application how can you provide somebody that can't hear that spoken audio access to the same information.

So, this is generally some way of providing a transcript.

This could be a popup that shows up in your app to show a transcript.

In the case of many great podcasts, they have online transcripts that somebody who's deaf could go and read to get the same contextual information that is conveyed in the podcase.

So, it really how and why you're using this spoken information for how you're going to adapt it to somebody that can't access it through hearing.

The next way that audio is used in apps are for sound effects or ways to convey information.

So, for example, in a game, you might convey where an enemy is by audio on the left side or the right side of the user.

And in these cases, you want to think about how can you provide that same information either through visual or haptic feedback to the user.

So, again it's thinking about if somebody can't hear this audio, which is really easy to simulate, you can just mute your device, how can we convey the same information in our game or application to such a user.

So, for audio, we are always thinking about how to convey the same information, what is an alternative way of conveying that.

The last part of media and video is thinking about video, which is kind of the combination of images and audio.

So, if you're not familiar, video has three key tracks, sometimes called media groups.

The first is a visual track. This is kind of the moving pictures that we see.

The next is the audible track. This is the track that contains all the sound, the sound effects, the spoken dialogue.

And last is what's called the legible track.

And this one most people are familiar with. I know most people are familiar with it because we intro'd this with a closed-captioned video. But you've probably also seen