Today is Global Accessibility Awareness day, or GAAD for short (what a wonderful acronym). It was set up 10 years ago to get people thinking about, and talking about, digital inclusion and accessibility, because there are more than one billion people living with disabilities and impairments, and, simply, we can support each other better.
It’s a day of learning more about the kinds of visual, hearing, motor and cognitive challenges people are living with, and using that knowledge to reappraise designs and systems we take for granted, and ask how they can be improved. There’s a great rundown of exactly this kind of thing on the GAAD website.
We’ve seen a tremendous improvement towards these ends in video games recently, particularly in the last year. Games like The Last of Us Part 2, which can be played without sight, serve as shining examples of what can be achieved with the proper investment and thought. It’s one of the reasons our writer Vivek Gohil declared 2020 “undoubtedly the greatest year for the gaming accessibility community since the release of the Xbox Adaptive Controller in 2018”. The indications real change is coming are definitely there.
