Characteristics and Motivations of Players with Disabilities in Digital Games
This provides foundational insights for a user-centered approach to game accessibility, addressing a gap in understanding players with disabilities.
The study surveyed 230 players with disabilities to understand their characteristics and motivations in digital games, finding they use assistive technologies and accessibility options while identifying as gamers with gaming as a primary hobby.
In research and practice into the accessibility of digital games, much of the work has focused on how to make games accessible to people with disa- bilities. With an increasing number of people with disabilities playing main- stream commercial games, it is important that we understand who they are and how they play in order to take a more user-centered approach as this field grows. We conducted a demographic survey of 230 players with disabilities and found that they play mainstream digital games using a variety of assistive tech- nologies, use accessibility options such as key remapping and subtitles, and they identify themselves as gamers who play digital games as their primary hobby. This gives us a richer picture of players with disabilities and indicates that there are opportunities to begin to look at accessible player experiences (APX) in games.