In looking over the examples from my students’ projects I was struck by how many students put effort into tackling emotional and cognitive issues with games. All projects covered at least one aspect of visual design—again, the focus of the course—but I was glad to see many students branching out into the more complicated lenses that dealt with common feelings of confusion or competition during game play. In following with the heuristic from Meeple Like Us, this also helped students focus on bigger accessibility issues instead of trying to account for specific disabilities. Some students did cover colorblindness specifically, as an example, but that reflects the ease with user testing for colorblindness using online tools such as Coblis color blindness simulator. Keeping the issues broad helped reinforce the idea that making the game more accessible promotes accessibility and use for all, instead of trying to account for singular needs as a form of “accommodation” (yergeau et al) or a sort of checklist approach as critiqued by the Game Accessibility Guidelines. The process is about making the games more accessible in their design and play, not trying to reach some sort of endpoint of perfect accessibility for all users.

Studying games helped keep the focus on play and getting all players to the table to have a good time. While a simple idea, I feel that this guiding principle is reinforced by the work of groups like Meeple Like Us and the gaming we did in-class. Once following the idea of getting people to play (play is fun, enjoying games with others is good, etc.) it became easier for students to empathize with how players can feel during the game. This included initial confusion with rules, or struggles with complexity, to having difficulty maneuvering pieces, reaching the board, or being able to distinguish complicated elements from one another. Additionally, as they were focused on re-designing the games for accessibility the students felt free to throw out any element of the game that seemed to be interfering with players being able to participate or enjoy the game. This helped students to critically analyze the design from an outsider perspective throughout the process, as called for in Flanagan's Critical Play Game Design Model. While students handled this process well, I could see some difficulty in this aspect of the project if students were critiquing their own designs for games as they would presumably be more invested in arguing for specific design features. Anyone looking to replicate this assignment should keep such potential emotions in mind and again make sure to scaffold the project with readings and discussions on accessibility as a foundational design concept so students designing their own games keep accessibility in mind from the start.

Alongside the broad approach to usability and empathizing with users, the material nature of these board games allowed students to participate in critical making when examining their games for accessibility. Students were encouraged to actually play the games with others and observe how individuals interacted with the game, its components, and the space of play. Many students recruited friends and family members (seen on the periphery of their projects, especially in some of their photographs) to play the games and used this feedback to identify issues. Some particularly enterprising students printed out redesigned game materials instead of just creating mockups in Photoshop and Illustrator and practiced playing the game with their revised materials. This element of physical making would be interesting to follow up on and require of students if I were teaching a class solely on making and accessibility, especially if I could obtain some support from a local makerspace with manufacturing capabilities.

Future Work

Ultimately, the theory, research, and student examples provided in this webtext aim to show evidence of using critical making and board games to teach students accessible design. My goal is for the materials presented to be useful to other scholars and teachers in rhetoric, composition, and game studies as they look to bring games into the classroom to teach useful concepts such as accessibility and critical making. As the examples from my class show, students can readily utilize concepts from game design, materiality and making, and disability studies to critically analyze design for visual, emotional, physical, and cognitive accessibility issues. In doing so they become both better designers and more empathetic to the needs of various users with diverse abilities.

The examples provided of course only provide some evidence of the usefulness of this approach. Further research and study should be conducted as this work is not a replacement for actual user testing of products, nor should students simply have one class or assignment on accessible design. Likewise, following the accessibility heuristic of Meeple Like Us can only broadly approach accessibility issues in design and is not a guarantee that all users will be able to play and enjoy a game. As accessibility is a process, readers should use this research as a jumping off point to build and support accessibility as a concept through all facets of design from initial conception to robust user testing of a finished product. Further work with actual users will undoubtedly uncover unique needs not accounted for in initial designs that can be then folded into the process. More inclusion of accessibility as a foundational design concept is needed in our courses and I hope this webtext provides one such example for including accessibility, making, and the materiality of games in the classroom.