Accessibility

[EricHVela]

What a lot of people get wrong with accessibility is thinking "easier" or "handholding".

Accessibility just means giving people access to stuff. It's right there in the word.

When considering accessible options, just give people access to the challenges. Don't make the challenges easier. That's for difficulty settings, not accessibility.

A lot of people already have hardware to compensate for physical needs. Visual and audio assistance is a different matter when it comes to games. An operating system's settings go only so far. That's where any accessibility focus needs to go. Colorblind, directional indicators, motional sickness, subtitles that provide equivalent experiences to other people.

Equivalent: Note that people whose perceptions are aligned differently from each other will never be able to perceive things the same way. Equivalent experience is the focus, not identical experience as that's impossible. Reducing challenge isn't an equivalent experience. Again, that's for the difficulty settings, not accessibility.

It's a little insulting when accessibility assumes someone's simply not capable of a challenge. That's for the individual to decide regardless of a person's accessibility needs if any.

E: If 3rd person alters intended gameplay challenges too much, don't do it. (I like 3rd person, but you are designing the challenges, and I want to experience that as intended.) An optional little dot on the screen helps me a lot with motion sickness in first person—not just one pixel but still much, much less than even 0.5% of the screen height. Optional headbob reduction/removal helps a bit more.