From Miles Morales to The Game Awards. Updated on 19 January 2021
2020. What a year? Nobody had 20/20 vision of our future, as reality transformed into a game and games stepped up to help us deal with that reality. That s true next-gen immersion.
Let me take you on an investigative journey backwards through 2020 using my trusty game accessibility magnifier lens. 2020 was undoubtedly the greatest year for the gaming accessibility community since the release of the Xbox Adaptive Controller in 2018.
The Last Of Us Part 2 was an utterly ground-breaking game on multiple levels: it solidified the foundation for accessibility whilst raising the bar for future game developers to build upon. Naughty Dog illustrated that consulting with accessibility specialists with various disabilities throughout development is indeed possible and worthwhile. It also emphatically proved that games with accessibility features can and will sell. Players without sight w
Microsoft designer fell out of bed and found a mission
Photo: Reuters Premium
James R. Hagerty
, The Wall Street Journal
August de los Reyes, who has died at age 50, championed inclusive designs making products easier to use for everyone
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Falling out of bed wrecked August de los Reyes’s spine and left him paralyzed from the chest down. It also made him a better product designer, he said.
Mr. de los Reyes, who was working at Microsoft Corp. at the time of the accident seven years ago, became an apostle of inclusive design, an approach that involves finding people whose disabilities exclude them from an activity and then making things work for them. Those new designs can benefit the masses, not just the excluded few. An example is the remote control, initially designed for people unable to get off the sofa to change the TV channel and now used by almost everyone.
It feels like every man and his dog has been hanging out for the latest Xbox Series X – and Humphrey Hanley and his beloved Siberian Husky, Whisky, are the perfect example. We love working with Humphrey, known to gamers everywhere as No Hands NZ, who you might have seen in 2018 talking about his experiences gaming without hands in Special controller changes lives of accessibility citizens in online gaming on TV’s Seven Sharp.
To mark the local launch of the Xbox Adaptive Controller, Xbox NZ worked with Kiwi ‘motivational streamer’ Humphrey Hanley. Humphrey has the rare skin-blistering condition epidermyolsis bullosa (EB), which means he has to spend four hours every morning bandaging his skin before he can start the day. Bullied at school, he found his fun in the PC gaming realm – he broadcasts to others online under the username NoHandsNZ.
The Ethics You Didn t Know Existed in Design
Just the other day, I was Googling something in a rush and came across a blog post that I thought would give me all the information I needed.
But, when I clicked on the page and tried to start reading the post, the entire screen went dark and a giant Subscribe to our email CTA popped up completely interrupting my experience.
I looked around for a No thanks button or an X , but I almost couldn t find one. Just before I went to click the back arrow, I noticed a very faint, tiny X that was nearly the same color as the CTA background. It was obvious that this site s designers wanted to trick visitors into signing up for an email list before reading their content.