Teaching Accessible Design Through Critical Making and Board Games

Adam Strantz, Miami University

Critical Making and Materiality


Making and materiality provides a unique intersection for writing and game studies to look at accessibility as a foundational aspect of good design practices. The process of making complex, multimodal experiences (whether games, websites, apps, or other types of interactive compositions) is often at odds with accessible design as the process of building or crafting requires certain assumptions about the types of skills and bodies assembled in the classroom. Sean Zdenek (2020) critiques studies of multimodal composing that rely intrinsically on able-bodied students and users, especially when such studies gloss over the material labor and process of creating physical or multimodal texts. He writes, “...the unstated assumption is that both the participants and their audiences are able-bodied (because everyone is assumed to be able to engage directly and immediately with multiple modes as they produce and consume media that require nimble fingers and fine motor skills)” (pp. 538-539). Games are produced with numerous material constraints/guidelines that impact users, such as the controller or interface used for playing the game, the sizing of text and imagery, the complexity or challenge of the game itself, and hand-eye-coordination or manual dexterity needed to succeed in the game. Although game console companies have made some efforts in this area to address accessibility needs for players, such as the Xbox adaptive controller, widespread adoption of accessibility controls in games has not been reached.

I believe that materiality and critical making can help bridge the accessibility gap, especially in teaching students good design practices. "Critical making," as a lens for studying accessibility and game design, provides a rhetorical approach to examining the process of building, designing, and making things. And as in Flanagan's (2009) book Critical Play, this lens allows for further scrutiny of the context surrounding the object/game being played (such as, where did the material come from? How much did it cost? Is this process sustainable?) and who is welcome into or able to participate in the game space. To address Zdenek’s concern for the assumptions built into multimodal composing, "critical making" must also involve students and users actively critiquing the makers/designers involved in the making process. This requires some reflection on the maker/designer’s part as they must identify gaps in their own knowledge or experience. Flanagan makes this need for diversity in the design process explicit in her Critical Play Game Design Model, writing "Within the critical play method, difference and value are fundamental concerns" (p. 258). She seeds opportunities for diversity throughout the design process, specifically calling for diverse individuals to be involved in designing and playtesting the game. This further allows for various perspectives to feed back into the game's design as such players may subvert or complicate the goals of the designers and lead to unexpected play results. (see also the Accessibility in Game Design page of this webtext for further discussion of Flanagan's model). Such diversity results in more well-rounded, culturally-specific, and overall better designs.

Although differently-abled individuals and diversity of bodies is not explicitly called for in this model, Jay Dolmage’s (2009) discussion of universal design positions individuals with disabilities at the center of the design process (2009). Critiquing the broad goals of universal design, he instead describes the design process as continual interaction and negotiation between designers and users. Unlike universal design which aims to make designs that are “usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design” (United States Access Board, 1995), Dolmage’s view of the design process includes and prioritizes diverse bodies and needs, recognizing that all users require some level of unique adaptation in order to use a design. Alongside Flanagan’s critical game design model, designing with accessibility and disability in mind can therefore be included as a core component of the design process. Not to mitigate such individual user differences, but embrace them. And by bringing a number of diverse individuals with unique material bodies and needs into the conversation, designers can aim to create a game that is not only accessible, but welcoming to many different players and play styles.

In the following sections I highlight some of the key ways materiality intersects with accessibility, critical making, and game play. Materiality is threaded through the experiences of these scholars as a way to approach making and doing in specific places and contexts with specific bodies, abilities, and perspectives. This view of materiality and the act of making is vital for situating both myself and the students as we work to redesign games.

Accessibility and Materiality

Accessibility and materiality are entwined in the study of the intersection of technologies, multimodal composition, and disability studies. Accessibility is often conceived of in very material terms such as having physical access to specific technologies, robust infrastructure for using said technologies, and the kinds of knowledge and experience to use those technologies. But, as discussed by Dolmage (2014) in his book Disability Rhetorics, disability studies scholars argue that we must remember that bodies are material as well. In opposition to both the medical model of disability that positions disabled bodies as outliers and the purely social model of disability that focuses on the disabling effects of society, Dolmage offers a third view. He writes, “The field of disability studies emphasizes the idea of the social or cultural construction of disability, while also insisting on the materiality of disability. Using a disability studies filter to view rhetoric, I recognize the emancipatory potential of new stories in both the “material” and social sphere. Disability, in this light, is bodily and rhetorical—two concepts that are tightly united” (pp. 8-9). By describing the body as both rhetorical and material, in this view individuals with disabilities and their bodies can tell different stories and argue for specific needs and viewpoints. It outright rejects the medical model that only sees a disabled body, but also allows for disabled bodies to exist in society on their own unique terms. Much as with Dolmage’s (2009) critique of universal design, a view of society that hides disabled bodies from view by making disability a “problem” for society to solve does not serve to empower individuals and allow their stories to be told. Dolmage again: “why not imagine that we could change the environment to minimize the constraining and impairing effects of intellectual and architectural structures, but also to emphasize and enable embodied differences to thrive?” (p. 96).

In this view the material needs and requirements of bodies are also paramount alongside the technologies needed to access and partake in society. Just as having access to a computer does not necessitate an individual being able to use and work with that device, being bodily able to participate in society is not the same as being able to do so without significant difficulty. And simply having material access does not reflect a lack of barriers to access. Through both Zdenek’s and Dolmage’s critiques and the lens of disability studies, accessibility must also be thought of as a continual process of making things accessible to a broad collection of physical, material bodies with different abilities and needs for engaging with the world. As Cynthia Selfe and Franny Howes (2013) argue, an “ethics of accessibility” needs to be enacted that promotes accessibility as a foundational need that creates and sustains this level of accessibility for all individuals (2013).

As we work to make our classrooms and composing spaces more accessible, these material needs—both technologies and the needs of our varied bodies—must be taken into account. Jason Palmeri’s (2006) article on teaching technology in technical/professional writing classrooms breaks down the binaries established between “normal” and “assistive” technologies by instead viewing “all technologies as assistive” (p. 58) as they provide an interface for reading and understanding the output of a computer—namely 1s and 0s. Likewise, all technologies exist in a web of material infrastructure (Frith, 2020) that is necessary for their use. In this sense accessibility is a necessary component for all users to compose with a computer as any sort of blip in that infrastructure can impede a user’s access. That blip can just happen for different users at different points along the path.

This shift in seeing accessibility as onerous requirement to a necessary part of all individuals’ ability to participate mirrors the work of Rebecca Day Babcock (2012) in her work with deaf students and hearing tutors in the writing center. She identifies numerous interpersonal factors that contributed to successful tutoring including communication (p. 121), interpreters (p. 121), the physical space (p. 125), and the technologies used in the tutoring session (p. 126). From her study, what was truly transformative from these interactions was the growing awareness of such interpersonal factors that allowed tutors to understand and empathize with their deaf tutees and their individualized needs. While these tutoring sessions required additional preparation and layers of communication including assistive technologies and interpreters, the core relationship between tutor and tutee was still paramount. In order to similarly build such a connection between students in a classroom, all aspects of the space must work together to promote accessibility including the material aspects of the space’s design, the technologies used there, the affordances of specific bodies, and most importantly, the perspective of those in that space who want to promote that culture/ethics of accessibility.

It follows that accessibility must be both a response to individual users’ material bodies as well as a fundamental, wide-ranging aspect of designing and creating accessible communication. Accessibility should be a goal and aim of the design, material or systemic infrastructures must be identified in order to support that design, and a plurality of individuals with unique perspectives and bodily needs should be included to allow for individualized accessibility. As Doug Eyman et al (2016) state, “Accessibility should lead us to think not just about opening doors, but also ensuring that these entrances and pathways are designed from the beginning so that no one needs to come in through the back entrance” (Making the Case, para 2). Documents and websites can have accessibility incorporated into their designs, but this approach is limited by the material infrastructure of the existing work. Writers cannot always account for the accessibility needs of all users, but by incorporating accessibility holistically into the foundational design aspects of their work they can better account for the needs of diverse users. At the same time, by incorporating accessibility early on writers can better involve users with diverse needs into the design process itself instead of retrofitting accessibility or trying to fit users into the design after the fact.

By incorporating access and accessibility into the design process, writers can better attend to the various material affordances affecting the use of multimodal compositions. Good design is more usable by all, and by designing with more user control in mind we can aim for greater access by users of diverse abilities and needs. Together with a relational view of rhetoric, critical making can encourage this view of building, designing, and making “things” that reflect a wide range of communities, bodies, and views.

Critical Making and Materiality in Makerspaces

In situating accessibility and designing for disability into the game play of my classroom, I looked for ways that rhetoric and composition scholars have already studied making and material practices onsite. Many scholars have studied makerspaces, a space at a university, library, or technology hub that comes with its own rules and procedures for practice. This is not unlike the writing classroom where making digital, multimodal compositions has increasingly become the norm and practices such as computer use, graphic design tools, and even games have become common tools for learning. Ann Shivers-McNair (2021) draws connections between makerspaces and the classroom in her book Beyond the Makerspace: Making and Relational Rhetorics. She writes: “Whether we are in a makerspace or a writing classroom, we persuade, negotiate, solve problems, create, and act using a combination of words, symbols, objects, movements, spaces, and relationships.” (p. 10). Seeing the work of the classroom or the makerspace as expansive and wide-ranging helps to dismiss critiques of certain work being outside the boundary of the space. Building on work from Indigenous scholars, disability studies scholars, feminist scholars, and work on access in computers and composition specifically, Shrivers-McNair crafts a view of relational rhetorics that is continually pushing against and across boundaries: “Rhetoric is relational. What and how we know and do is inseparable from where, when, in what bodies, and with whom we know and do” (p. 24).

Viewing making as a relational, communal process broadens the conception of what “counts” as making and pulls the term back from its popular connection to makerspaces as overly technical and technology-driven spaces. Krystin Gollihue (2019) builds on aforementioned Indigenous scholars and specifically Malea Powell’s (2016) call for more culturally-responsive Makerspaces by studying her family farm as a space of “makerly practice” (p. 25). By defining the farm as a makerspace Gollihue creates a space for making that is communal and relational, built upon the history of her family and its connection to the land. This connects the “things” of making to a long history of development, knowledges, and people beyond the specific individuals working in the makerspace. She writes: “While a study of critical making necessarily requires attention to things, it is not enough to only concern ourselves with things. Instead, things must be in relation to the people that made them, the history that surrounds them, and the cultures and practices they represent” (p. 23). A relational view of making and makerspaces demands a wider view of the people and knowledges that feed into any acts of making. A view that connects to both makerspaces and the classroom as a communal space where things—including multimodal compositions, graphic designs, websites, apps, and games—are seen as rhetorical entities that stretch beyond the confines of the space. The products of such spaces therefore reflect the values and concerns of the makers themselves, the space, and the institution (see also Wendi Sierra's webtext in this issue).

Focusing on who is making in a space supports the participatory nature of making (Morris, 2012) where making can be an internalized, thoughtful act of examining one’s own skills, expertise, and experience. This experience can in turn be shared with others as described by Qwo-Li Driskill (2015) in their article on Decolonial Skillshares where indigenous practices and cultural memory are shared through acts of making. They write: “The teaching of indigenous rhetorics and practices must hold decolonization and indigenous cultural continuance for indigenous peoples as its ultimate goal. The purpose of a decolonial skillshare is not to disseminate scholarly or theoretical work but also to learn and share specific embodied practices” (p. 64). Through the embodied practice of making specific stories are told, culture and beliefs are maintained, and community is built around decolonial action. I was able to participate in one such skill share at the Cultural Rhetorics 2016 conference where Qwo-Li and two other indigenous scholars, Angela Haas and Emily Legg, (Driskill, Haas, and Legg, 2016) led a workshop on basket weaving. The three led participants through the act of Cherokee basket weaving while connecting the embodied practice to stories and histories of the Cherokee people. In learning with this practice of embodied making I see making with specific action in mind as a way to build both relations and community around that action. In the case of critical making for accessibility, as detailed in my students’ work in the Re-Design Project, examining their own biases and preconceived notions of “good design” through making created a space for critiquing lack of accessibility in design more broadly.

This view connects to the focus on the individual in disability studies and accessibility that positions a varied user body with unique needs from other users. Users with disabilities, or who find many designs inaccessible, are often most adept at making and remaking elements of a design to suit their needs. So-called “life-hacks” (Robinson, 2019) are one of many ways such individuals have for engaging with a world that is often ill-designed for needs outside a very narrow spectrum of ability. By engaging with the material, accessibility—like critical making—provides a lens for studying the effects of design on users with diverse needs and abilities.

Game Play and Materiality in the Classroom

The classroom as a physical space comes with many of the same preconceptions as those found by scholars studying makerspaces including who is welcome in that space and what kind of work/making is privileged. Here I see a strong connection to game studies as disrupting the preconceptions of a classroom is one area where game studies teachers and scholars have excelled, whether rearranging the traditional class space to make room for gaming, to bringing in systems and software for playing games. Rebekah Shultz Colby and Richard Colby (2008), for example, discuss how “Playing WoW as part of a class can disrupt the materiality of gamespaces and classrooms” (p. 303) by incorporating the virtual world of World of Warcraft as another space for the class. Shultz Colby (2017), in her comprehensive study of the ways writing teachers bring games into the classroom, further found that many teachers use games as a participatory space where the community of-and-around the game becomes a place for critical examination of texts and experiences (p. 64). In each of these cases the use of games challenges the standard boundaries of the classroom and invites students to reconceptualize what learning, writing, and making in the classroom looks like.

Bringing board games into the classroom causes similar disruption, including physically arranging tables and chairs so students can play, dumping out components from their boxes, and setting up the boards. Melissa J. Rogerson, Martin Gibbs, and Wally Smith (2016) highlight the tangibility of board games specifically in their article ““I love all the bits”: The Materiality of Boardgames” and the ways in which these physical components are important to players. They identify four areas of game materiality: the game board and components, the game box, the play environment, and the player’s home (pp. 3959 - 3962). From their interviews, players overwhelmingly enjoyed customizing the game with deluxe components, protecting cards with sleeves, keeping things organized, and having a dedicated place to play in their home. While this research supports the study’s focus on players’ overall enjoyment of board game components and use of components to enhance the play experience, it also glosses over the use of materials needed to simply participate in the game. Their section in immediate play environment discusses enhancing the environment to protect game components, for example, although one interviewee specifically mentions her enjoyment of playing games in bars and bringing her own lamp as the bars never have adequate light for gaming (p. 3962). This aspect of life-hacking or DIY brought to board games highlights the way that framing can also help players identify ways that material components of the game are vital. Good lighting that enhances one player’s experience or enjoyment of the game might be necessary for another to participate at all.

Although Rogerson, Gibbs, and Smith only touch on these accessibility issues briefly, other scholars have studied specific examples of hacking and DIY-ing accessibility into the game design process specifically, such as Kara Stone’s (2018) use of craft and disability in game design, or Jess Marcotte’s (2018) queering of controller use and agency. Jamie L. McDaniel (2019) highlights the inherent ableism built into board games due to their specific material components as opposed to other mediums like video games where various accessibility features can be tweaked by the player. He writes, "Video games support electronic technology and virtual representations of game elements in medium-specific ways that tabletop games do not. As a result, many of these tabletop games exhibit ableism. For example, countless tabletop games contain small pieces that are difficult to maneuver or game elements with poor color choices for colorblind players" (para 3). The material components or "bits" to borrow from Rogerson, Gibbs, and Smith are well-loved by board game players (see Youtube board game reviews where the materials are often lovingly strewn about, or how much stuff you get in the box is proof of a game's value), and this unconscious ableist bias is often overlooked by those looking to bring play and games into a new environment such as the workplace or classroom.

When I bring board games into the classroom for students to play with before we begin the Re-Design Project, I want students to notice these material aspects of play so I let students direct a lot of the action in the room. They choose their play groups, the game they want to play, how to set up, and so forth. Following from the aforementioned game design scholars, I encourage students to think about the board game components, the space they want to play in, and what they need to do to ensure all group members are able to play the game. This initial examination is of course most pronounced when students are playing an unfamiliar game such as Dixit, Carcassonne, or Catan, as they need time to go over the rules and assemble the game board and elements. But even with more familiar games such as Monopoly, or Connect Four, the act of playing in the classroom with fellow students provides a different play experience than they are used to. Barriers to play such as not being able to see and read tiny fonts, maneuver complex pieces, or move about the table to play the game are identified at this time and we can begin having discussions on some of the "abliest assumptions" (McDaniel, 2019) that surround our play.

I find these initial classroom play sessions vital to getting students in the right frame of mind for the project as they can identify issues that arise in their group. Members might find a new game’s rules or text confusing, helping them empathize with those struggling to learn the game. Some members may find the board game or pieces difficult to interact with, and the team may take awhile to even begin playing as they figure out how to set the game up so everyone can play. And that is the key aspect: getting everyone to the table to play. Once students are in the frame of mind that they want to play and they want others to play too, it becomes easier to scrutinize elements of the game that create a barrier for others to participate and enjoy the experience.