What do you call a lazy kangaroo? A pouch potato.

Bonus: What do stylish kangaroos wear? Jumpsuits.

When you think of someone playing video games, what comes to mind? Is it a group of friends teaming up in an online shooter? Someone sitting alone in front of their computer shooting aliens? Maybe an older gentleman playing Wordle? For many Americans, video games have become a part of life. Americans spend almost seven times as much on video games ($59.3 billion) as they do on movie tickets ($8.7 billion). They spend more on video games than they do on pizza ($45 billion). But despite the economic importance of the industry, you probably know the names of more movie stars than game developers. Video games have not managed to elevate themselves in the public consciousness the way that movies (and pizza) have. The effect is that games don't get much attention when they exclude people from playing them.

I had the pleasure of attending The Seattle Indies Games for Blind Gamers event last week. There were a lot of games being shown off with great accessibility features. Microsoft had a big presence, as did some smaller game studios. The best part was the speaker panel, which consisted of accessibility professionals from big tech companies but also independent studios and hobbyists. The common theme from all of them was that video games still aren’t doing enough to reduce barriers to play.

I agree with that. Despite how massive the industry is, it still lags in terms of cultural relevance. This leads to lower expectations from consumers, developers, and regulators. There have been great strides in the last decade to make games accessible, but we still lack widespread adoption. The companies building the platforms and engines that are used to make games aren't paying close enough attention to future business realities. Because games still lack the cultural weight of other media, we tolerate exclusion in ways we wouldn’t elsewhere.

When I was a full-time game developer, there wasn’t nearly as much thought given to accessibility. We put captions on videos and checked for photosensitive epilepsy triggers. We checked for color blindness, but mainly because most of the developers were male, and one in seven men have some form of color blindness. There was always someone on the team who could point out when they couldn't tell the difference between two colors.

Nowadays, game developers add the ability to remap controls however a player likes. Games include features like aim assist, increased audio cues, enemy highlighting, and even the ability to adjust the speed of a game. There are adaptive, configurable controllers for all the game consoles. Bryce Johnson, who worked on the Xbox Adaptive Controller, was in attendance at the Seattle Indies event. He chatted with me about how the controller was developed and Microsoft's commitment to making games accessible for all. Configurable controllers like this are an example of how accessibility options in games have proliferated, removing barriers and allowing more people to take part in the hobby.

The industry now celebrates games that include accessibility features. The recent Game Awards nominated five games for “Innovations in Accessibility.” The winner was Doom: The Dark Ages. The original Doom, released in 1993, was certainly limited in terms of accessibility. Like younger me, they probably didn’t consider accessibility during the development of the original. The current iteration has all the accessibility features described above and more. The developers obviously wanted as many people as possible to dive in to their new game and beat back the forces of hell. These games, along with the game accessibility guidelines, make it clear to any developer how to remove barriers to play.

But barriers still exist, and adoption of these measures is not universal. The nominees for Innovations in Accessibility are implementing well understood features, not inventing new ones. There are no revolutions, just solid implementations of the features we've long known are needed. These individual features are all important, but their existence is dependent on each studio rediscovering and reimplementing the same solutions. The true innovation would be for all games to have these features, not because developers are implementing accessibility features on a case by case basis, but because the underlying infrastructure makes those features ubiquitous.

When games aren’t built to be accessible, players are left with incomplete experiences or need to come up with their own solutions. Zack Kline, a blind accessibility professional and one of the speakers at the Seattle Indies event, develops plugins in his free time for popular games to make them more accessible. I’m sure this is time consuming, and Zack likely doesn’t receive any compensation. He does it because he loves games and wants to play the same games everyone else is playing. The fact that this work is being done by players through unmonetized plugins, rather than built into the product, is what infrastructure failure looks like.

The creation of adaptive controllers makes it easier for players with disabilities to play the games they want to play. But once you get past the controller, those other accessibility features require custom implementation by each game developer. Reimplementing the same features multiple times is triggering for my software engineer brain. It’s an inefficient use of engineering and design time and leads to the current patchwork landscape where accessibility is often only achievable by large teams with big budgets. Smaller studios and independent developers need to decide whether the cost of making their games accessible is worth it.

Game engines and platforms are the infrastructure layer of the industry. Studios accelerate development by building games on top of the mountains of code engines provide, then ship the games to the various platforms like Xbox, PlayStation, Mac, and Windows. One of the most popular engines for making games, Unity, only made screen reader support available to developers in September of 2025. Another popular engine, Unreal, allows developers to enable screen reader support as an experimental feature, and only for a subset of platforms. Unreal has kept screen reader support in an experimental state since 2019. Likely the only reason it was added is because of laws like the European Accessibility Act and the U.S. Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which require video and chat software to be accessible. Many online games include voice and text chat capabilities and those features fall under the purview of those laws.

I don’t think legislation should have to be the answer. Laws are a great tailwind for setting a minimum bar, but on their own they don’t encourage much more than what is legally defensible. If the engine and platform teams that game developers rely on won’t implement accessibility centrally until forced, players with disabilities will be left to figure out solutions on their own. This means that eventually you will also be excluded from playing the games you want to play.

If you’re lucky, you’ll live long enough to one day have a disability. It’s a fact of life that as we age, we are no longer able to do the things we once could. Increasingly, the number of people who play video games also identify as having a disability. A 2008 survey from PopCap, one of my former employers, found that 20% of casual game players identify as having a disability, compared to 15% of the overall U.S. population. I expect the same survey would show an even higher percentage of gamers with disabilities. The people who play games are now older and with age comes disability. Biology is clear on this point.

My parents’ generation didn’t grow up playing video games. My generation did, as many of us had computers at home. The generation after me is growing up playing games on their mobile devices. Video games should be something we can continue enjoying into old age. The most requested accessibility features in video games are controller remapping, subtitles, increased text size, improved visual contrast, and speed and timing adjustments. These features support the decline in visual and motor capability we expect as people age. Games are a hobby that requires little physical movement or endurance, is forgiving of mistakes, and is inexpensive relative to the amount of time you can spend playing a game versus watching a movie or even reading a book. This makes gaming ideal not just for people with disabilities, but also for older players.

Increased accessibility in video games makes good business sense. The number of people who expect to play video games as a natural part of their leisure activities will only increase, and the games that reach more people will capture a larger share of that $59.3 billion video game pie. I wish progress were faster and support more widespread, but we may just have to wait until platform and engine developers finally realize that accessibility is a business priority. Accessibility will only scale when it’s treated as shared infrastructure, not as a competitive differentiator each studio must build on its own.

For more information about accessibility in video games and some other interesting topics that didn’t quite fit into the narrative, check out these links:

The wallabison has the shaggy, horned head of a bison set atop the tall body of a giant kangaroo. Its hind legs launch the creature across ravines, fences and even city walls. When a wallabison lands, its thunderous stomp cracks stone, flattens crops, and bowls over armored soldiers. Herds of wallabison move in coordination, bounding in great arcs that churn grassland into wasteland.

As always, you can find more on the Wallabison for free over on Patreon.

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