Accessibility in PC action/adventure games

According to the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) must be accessible. For this reason, the objective of this study was to discover the percentage of accessibility guidelines present in fifty PC action/adventure games released in the last twelve years (2010-2022). To this aim, a checklist of options and features was created by considering current guidelines, such as the Game Accessibility Guidelines (GAG) by Ellis et al. and Xbox Guidelines; laws, such as the Twenty- First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 from the United States; and standards, such as the European Accessibility requirements for ICT products and services (also known as EN 301 549). Moreover, the majority of these options in the checklist were assigned a rank from basic, intermediate, and advanced based on the categorization proposed in the GAG to determine which guideline levels the examined games are complying with. The games were selected based on availability, iterations, and popularity in the action/adventure genre. They were reviewed and played to verify if the accessibility features defined on the checklist were available. The results revealed that 44% of the titles include options that meet accessibility guidelines, 81% incorporate options for people with cognitive disabilities, 44% for motor and speech disabilities, 38% for auditory, and 25% for visual. With regards to guideline category (basic, intermediate, and advanced), most titles (73%) comply with basic-level guidelines, 43% with intermediate, and 14% with advanced. Further research lines include multiplatform accessibility assessments from different genres, publishers, and studios. More concretely, I intend to expand this investigation by researching video game accessibility in my PhD program from the point of view of other systems (including PC as well), such as virtual reality and the PlayStation 5, and genres, such as action RPG, sports/racing, first-person shooter (FPS), point and click, turn-based combat/tactics, and strategy games. Therefore, this work will investigate which accessibility solutions are available in other spaces and genres not previously studied and aims to use the gathered data to create an online database for public consultation.