10 influential accessible mobile games

The developer of Dice World was founded on the principle that mobile gaming should be available to everyone. This is evident in the developer's name, AppA11y, which includes the abbreviation for accessibility (A11y). AppA11y didn’t want to create a game for blind gamers. Instead, they wanted to create a game where blind and sighted gamers could compete on the same level. Utilizing the Apple VoiceOver feature, Dice World allows a blind player to compete in multiplayer matches across six different dice games. The flawless VoiceOver interface allows the blind player to compete on a level playing field with sighted opponents. Dice World introduced social gaming to the blind population. Through virtual gameplay, Dice World has brought together blind gamers from around the world and created a vibrant visually impaired gaming community.

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Dice World

Historically, the creation of an accessible game has come as an afterthought for a game developer. Games were developed for the sighted community first, and then through gamer advocacy, may have had accessibility added after the release of the game. Marty Schultz started Blindfold Games to cater to the blind and visually impaired community.

Schultz spent a career in software engineering. Over the years, he has started and sold half a dozen companies. In 2014, he volunteered in a STEM program his daughter was attending. The children conceptualized an audio driving game that ultimately was called Blindfold Racer. Schultz honed the game's design by conducting demonstrations for blind individuals at Lighthouse facilities, disabled Veteran Affairs groups, and for staff at the Carroll Center for the Blind. Through these collaborations, Blindfold Games has released dozens of games across a wide variety of genres. Knowing that the blind community has been burned by purchasing games that were not accessible, Blindfold Games created a coin system that allowed the gamer to play the game for a period of time before purchasing it.

Blindfold Games would go on to create simulations of popular viral games, such as Candy Crush and Flappy Bird. This allowed the blind community to be part of water cooler conversations around the "in" games.

Blindfold Games' contribution to accessible gaming was to show that a wide variety of games could be made accessible through audio. The developer offers card, board, casino, strategy, racing, puzzle, word, action, quiz, and sports games. The complete Blindfold Games catalogue is accessed through the company's App Launcher. Blindfold Games’ catalogue of games ensures that there is a game for every type of gamer.

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Blindfold Games

A Dark Room is an early example of a developer collaborating directly with the blind community to create an accessible game. Through an AppleVIs forum, the game’s developer was contacted by a blind player. The gamer communicated his love for the game and some of the inaccessible mechanics that prevented him from completing the game. Amir accepted the challenge of learning how to incorporate accessibility into his RPG adventure. Amir went to the extreme of blindfolding himself to ensure that he could complete the game using the VoiceOver functionality. Through his efforts, Amir created one of the first fully accessible mobile RPG adventures.

This accomplishment wasn’t achieved without difficulty. The hardest part of making A Dark Room accessible was creating a method for the blind player to traverse the world. As Amir explains, “I wanted to make map traversal as efficient as possible. I imagine that y'all have to exercise an immense amount of patience when it comes to consuming information without sight, but I didn't want to be lazy about the communication of that information." The interactive world map designed by Amir Rajan is a crowning accessibility achievement. A text log provides relative coordinates to points of interest, found locations, and unexplored terrain. This map design allows a blind player to easily grasp the surroundings by swiping through the log using VoiceOver.

A Dark Room created an efficient approach for the blind community to explore a vast gaming world. Eventually, this map accessibility concept will show up in future accessible RPG games (Swordy Quest).

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A Dark Room

Football Chairman Pro puts the player at the helm of a football (soccer) team as you guide the team from the beer leagues to the top of the premier league. The game has been downloaded over 2 million times and is played by celebrities, professional athletes, and commoners.

This game is perfect in its flawless display of complexity. There are a plethora of aspects to manage as the football chairman. Besides building a player roster, you have to consider your financial investments. Do you purchase a young "hot shot" attacker? Do you refurbish the team’s training facility? Do you spend money on the youth league, hoping it will pay dividends years down the road? Throughout the season, you have to set the ticket prices, repair the turf, build more seating capacity, pick the team’s sponsors, and consider the number of food and merchandise stands to install. Furthermore, you have to balance the competing needs of the fans, manager, and players while trying not to go bankrupt.

What I love about this game is that there is a lot to keep track of and consider. I am tired of games accessible to blind players being simple, stripped-down versions of games a sighted player would play. Football Chairman Pro tracks a tremendous amount of data through an ever-updating database. The game’s ability to concisely and smoothly communicate that data back to the blind player makes it the best sports management game available for mobile devices. During my interview with the development team, they discussed why inclusion was important to the game’s development. "The biggest thing that has surprised us is how many games aren't accessible or playable with VoiceOver. That's made us even more determined to make sure that Football Chairman does give blind users a fully playable football management game.”

I hope that other developers will channel FC Pro’s passion and replicate this model across other sports management games. Ironically, the visually impaired community lacks an accessible baseball simulation game. FC Pro’s framework could be the roadmap to rectify this oversight.

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Football Chairman Pro

A Blind Legend demonstrated to gamers and developers that it is possible to create a three-dimensional world using only sound. The game sets the scene by casting the player as a blind knight who needs to rescue his kidnapped wife. Your daughter acts as your sighted guide throughout the world. She often runs ahead of you beckoning you to follow. The sound of her voice signals the direction you need to travel. The game creates a three-dimensional landscape through the player’s headphones. Solely utilizing sound, you will traverse the landscape, ride horses, fight enemies, and gather information from NPCs. All of these actions are accomplished with traditional finger swipes and screen taps.

A Blind Legend laid the foundation for immersive world-accessible gaming. The game’s developers explained, “For us, the game achieves two objectives: giving VI people access to high-quality video games, but also raising public awareness of this type of disability.”

A Blind Legend represents the first significant step to making fully three-dimensional worlds accessible to the visually impaired. Furthermore, the game features the capabilities of the disabled community by casting a blind person as the protagonist.

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A Blind Legend

The most accessible game genre is the text-adventure game. Text-adventure games rely on the written word and the imagination of the player. There are no graphics for the blind gamer to process. Therefore, the iPhone’s embedded screen reader (VoiceOver) can fully access text-adventure stories. There is a long history of text-based adventure games offered through the Choice Script program and hosted through Choice of Games LLC. However, the majority of these games offer a narrow branching story based on the limited choices available to the player. Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven takes the basic choices from a traditional text adventure and creates an intricate apocalyptic world.

At the start of the game, Safe Haven goes to great lengths to be sure you can create a character in your own likeness. The game offers a variety of sexualities, professions, hobbies, skills, and challenges. In fact, Jim’s first Zombie Exodus game was so well received by the blind community that he wanted to be sure that a disabled hero was possible to generate. Jim added the ability to create a blind and/or deaf main character to survive the zombie apocalypse.

Throughout the game, you will have to manage the status of your relationships with individual survivors, as well as other communities. With each decision, your character will evolve, opening and closing potential paths to survival. Once the story is complete, the developer expects there to be dozens of potential endings. Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven's greatest accomplishment is the sense of agency it infuses into a text-adventure story. Jim Dattilo has revolutionized the text-adventure genre into a full-fledged gaming experience. Furthermore, he has allowed a disabled character to play the role of a hero rather than a victim. Jim expressed his excitement that "… technology has finally gotten to a point where [developers] can include people who haven’t been included in the past.”

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Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven

A Few Minutes of Glory is a balance between resource allocation, military strategy, and time management. There are not many real-time strategy games that have the proper balance between these three components. Often, the VoiceOver interface is too clunky for the blind player to properly engage with the game. This is because it takes a visually impaired gamer too long to navigate the various elements in the time frame allotted. Once I understood A Few Minutes of Glory’s layout, I was able to adequately execute the various tasks to advance the game. I never felt that I ran out of time because of my inability to move through the screen fast enough.

Real-time strategy games are difficult to execute using VoiceOver. The slower nature of having to swipe through the elements on the screen is often too cumbersome to effectively play the game. The compact layout of A Few Minutes of Glory eliminates that concern. James demonstrated that through thoughtful design, a real-time strategy game could be fully accessible to the visually impaired.

James has pointed to the efforts of Amir Rajan in adding accessibility to A Dark Room as his inspiration for including accessibility across his various games. Hopefully, James' slate of games will inspire future generations of game developers to consider adding accessibility across a variety of game genres.

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A Few Minutes of Glory

Often game developers work on their projects within a vacuum. This isolation often leads to accessibility being an afterthought to the game’s development. The rise in accessibility awareness has led developers to consider accessibility earlier in the development process. Charlie Seligman not only considered accessibility from the outset of his game (Swordy Quest), he actively engaged the visually impaired community throughout the creation of his game. This collaboration between a game developer and the disabled community has created an accessibility masterpiece. Swordy Quest immerses the player in the world of Fonetazia, where gods have transformed and imprisoned evil bosses in castles around the world. It is your job to defeat the bosses and save the lands.

Throughout the game, players will battle bosses, fight dragons, craft weapons, haul fish from the ocean, gather resources, hunt monsters, search for clues, duel in PvP arenas, and trade commodities. Each of these activities has unique sound cues to make the gameplay accessible to a blind player.

There is a 50 by 50 square map to travel on your adventures. The game’s developer utilized the grid coordinates labelling that first appeared in A Dark Room. In addition, players can access a legend that provides the relevant position of each location to the player. However, Charlie added to the world map by adding an auto travel mechanic. This draws the route between the player’s current location and the selected destination. This auto travel mechanic was a top wish list item from the game’s blind and visually impaired player base.

Another thing that makes Swordy Quest fun, is the vibrant blind and VI community that has embraced the game. There are multiple Facebook groups dedicated to the game. Several blind and visually impaired content creators have covered the game on their YouTube channels. In particular, Michael Gray from NewDeath Gaming has posted over 100 videos about Swordy Quest on his YouTube Channel. Charlie often attends these live broadcasts and indicates that "[Michael] will raise really valid points on what is missing. It is also the biggest chance I get to see VoiceOver being used by those actually playing the game. The insights are invaluable.”

Swordy Quest provides a full-fledged RPG game that is completely accessible to the visually impaired. Furthermore, the developer’s care and effort toward serving the needs of the blind and visually impaired community are unparalleled. Swordy Quest should be held up as an example of the mutual benefits for the players and developers when games are made accessible.

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Swordy Quest

What makes Blind Drive stand out is its superior audio design quality. The game relies on the player’s ability to hear distinct sounds within the environment.

The game begins with the protagonist joining a research project to make a few bucks. Unfortunately, a ‘mad’ scientist locks him in a remote-controlled car. Blindfolded and handcuffed to the wheel, the player has to rely on his hearing to avoid the oncoming traffic. As you hurtle down the road, the scientist calls to introduce new challenges to finish the task and earn the $500 payment. The driver is constantly distracted by interfering sounds, such as a buzzing fly, the wind, music, and a rain storm. The subject needs to avoid cars, motorcycles, cows, chickens, and bullets. While at the same time, ram bicyclists, the cops, and ice cream trucks. The story builds to an interesting twist as all is not as it seems.

The volume balance between the conversations, traffic, and distractions creates the complexity of the game. How often as a blind person are we attempting to pick out a particular sound from a cacophony of other noises? At times the sounds are muffled or drowned out by alternative sounds, or there are so many sounds that it is almost a guess if you are making the right move. But, that is exactly the point of the game. To get this balance perfect, the game developers involved visually impaired gamers during the game’s creation. Lo-Fi People explains that “We built a strong relationship with the visually impaired gamers community already in the development phase and had quite a lot of visually impaired playtesters. We wanted to make sure the game is fully accessible and enjoyable down to the smallest detail.”

High-quality, multi-layered, directional sound will be the cornerstone of open-world creation. Lo-Fi People has laid the groundwork toward fully realized three-dimensional world-building.

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Blind Drive

For millions of gamers, their disabilities prevent them from partaking in the majority of activities enjoyed by their peers. Electronic games provide the opportunity for visually impaired and sighted gamers to compete on the same field. Modern technology and accessibility awareness has expanded player inclusion across a wide variety of genres.

Historically, first-person shooter games have been a challenge to incorporate accessibility. Audio Defense and Circus Master’s Revenge have provided their offering in the genre. However, To the Dragon Cave draws on these games to improve on the first-person shooter genre. The game features a blind protagonist who flips the script on the typical storybook adventure. To the Dragon Cave propels the player through a frantic FPS game that crescendos into four potential endings.

Kikiriki Games’ main focus was to create a first-person shooter that would connect blind and sighted gamers. The Czech-based team is comprised of both blind and sighted developers. By leveraging each team member’s unique perspective, the group created an epic adventure with a blind female protagonist. "To the Dragon Cave" is proof that game developers can create inclusive games in the most challenging genres.

This accomplishment was achievable because Kikiriki Games made accessibility a primary pillar of the game development process. Making a truly accessible game requires the game developer to consider accessibility from the outset of the project. "To the Dragon Cave" has been downloaded by thousands of blind and sighted players. In forums, comment sections, and in person, these two groups are discussing the merits and challenges of a common experience. In the end, Kikiriki Games achieved its goal of bridging the gaming gap between blind and sighted players.

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To The Dragon Cave

Hopefully, future development teams will comprise a mix of developers with different physical abilities. These alternative perspectives increase the awareness of gaming accessibility and lead to game accessibility design being considered at the start of the project.

Gaming accessibility has taken major strides over the past 10 years. These indie mobile game developers played pivotal roles in advancing gaming accessibility. Through their games, visually impaired players fought dragons, traversed alien planets, survived the zombie apocalypse, drove cars, navigated three-dimensional worlds, and played against friends in multiplayer competitions. However, the crowning achievement over the past 10 years is the growing opportunity for disabled gamers to participate in an increasing number of game categories. Ultimately, these indie game developers' efforts will make it possible to incorporate accessibility in all game genres.