The A11yCats Game Design Process: An Irreverent Reverent Adventure in Accessibility by Carie Fisher
The Digital Accessibility Lab team at Iowa State University has been designing and developing the A11yCats Game. The team embraces the disability community concept, “Nothing about us, without us.” The games impetus is to embrace disabled characters as playable characters and to form a research study of how disabled players want to be represented in games. Too often, players with disabilities are not included in any phases of game design and development. While disabled characters sometimes appear in games, they are nonplayable characters (NPCs). NPCs devalue and “Other” disabled persons. Further, the game is being created with accessibility in mind from the beginning with art, design, and code.