The technical scope of game development is continuously expanding, and as a result there are less and less excuses not to make every effort to increase game accessibility, especially in AAA projects where resources are readily available to allow for it. One particularly salient example concerns the size of in-game text: game developers really need to stop making in-game fonts so damn tiny.
This has been an issue for ages, with the first biggest controversy coming from Dragon Age: Inquisition’s fans who struggled immensely with reading the game’s text, especially when playing on consoles. It was so bad that a petition was started in an attempt to convince the BioWare developers to fix the subtitling and general lettering in the game. Some fans took matters into their own hands by creating mods for DOI that overhaul the illegible fonts, replacing them with more reader-friendly ones.
That was in 2014, but even now - five years later - many game developers still don’t seem to be keeping vision accessibility in mind. This is super weird, considering how straightforward and possible it is to do just the opposite.
Video Games & Vision
With video games being so heavily dependent on the visual conveyance of information, every effort must be made during the development of a game to ensure this information can be effectively transmitted to its players. This will inevitably involve considering possible visual deficits said players might have, and how they can be compensated for. While it is unrealistic to expect every game to perfectly compensate for every possible vision deficit known to humankind, it is certainly reasonable - and possible - to adhere to a handful of rules of thumb that make a game more accessible to the majority of its players.
These rules of thumb can also be considered usability heuristics, because they are methods of increasing the usability of a game. If they or similar methods aren’t adopted, the result is generally that immersion gets broken and frustration sets in. Players won’t be very keen on playing a game that requires them to spend most of the time squinting at their screens.
Read Between The Lines
So what are these heuristics? It could be a matter as simple as adding in a slider that a player can use to adjust the text size. Like the developers behind 2018’s God of War did (after receiving complaints from fans). Especially in the case of console games, in which players are often seated further away from their screens, fonts should be clear and ideally not smaller than 28 pixels for UI text, and 46 pixels for subtitles. Perhaps take a leaf from Assassin’s Creed: Origins’ book and include an option to add a black box behind subtitles, to eliminate the possibility of the text disappearing in front of lighter backgrounds in the game.
The Small Font Complaint is still running rampant following the release of games like Fire Emblem: Three Houses and The Outer Worlds, both of which have brutally small fonts that make playing the games infuriating for many fans, especially on consoles. Thankfully, an upcoming patch for The Outer Worlds is set to increase the text size. Of course, it seems like a far more efficient option just to go ahead and include these options from the beginning, rather than having to be pressured into patching it in after players complain online.
Basically, vision accessibility options should be standard practice in game development, along with other basic accessibility efforts concerning, say, auditory deficits. Besides, literally everyone - those with such deficits or otherwise - will benefit from a little less squinting.
