Behind the Rebellion

How Rebellion Celebrated GAAD 2024

17th June 2024

Global Accessibility Awareness Day is the third Thursday of May, this year that was May 16th. Across games and beyond, people and organisations celebrate accessibility and use it as an opportunity to learn more about creating experiences more people can enjoy.

For GAAD 2024, Rebellion hosted a whole week of events and campaigns to raise awareness of accessibility. Here’s what we got up to!

Accessibility Expo

In our Oxford office we ran a drop-in expo during the day and over lunch with ‘stalls’ around the room. We invited guests like RNIB, SpecialEffect and Gordon Bicker – a student from Abertay who we’ve been mentoring in accessible level design. The room also included an assistive tech set up, showcase of experimental audio navigation game Blind Bake, our EDI forum and some of our own work. The expo provided a space for developers to learn by speaking with experts and interacting with demos and hardware to get a greater understanding of accessibility and barriers.

A collage showing the Rebellion GAAD expo 2024. Developers looking at boardgame accessibility options as well as in video games.

Talks

Throughout the week we ran internal lunchtime talks for our developers including:

Accessibility at Rebellion: An overview of accessibility plans across all projects. This helps our developers to see the plans across the company.

Show us the Stats: A statistical review of game settings and difficulty, and how our numbers chalk up with other titles.

Guide Dogs UK: A talk from charity Guide Dogs UK including insights into their work in gaming and lived experience insight from visually impaired gamer, Carlos Rodriguez.

Accessibility Unplugged: A talk from our tabletop team, Rebellion Unplugged, on the work they’ve been doing to enhance accessibility in their products.

Game Accessibility Conference Debrief

During Rebellion’s monthly accessibility meet up, which fell during the week of GAAD, the attendees of the Game Accessibility Conference put together a debrief where we highlighted our favourite talks from the conference and what we learned from them. The conference is available online to watch here.

Developer Testimonials

It was important to us this year to hear from our team who’ve been putting in great work to boost accessibility in our projects. We asked 4 developers for testimonials on how they feel about accessibility and incorporate it into their workflow. These testimonials were shared on LinkedIn.

Developer testimonials regarding accessibility in games. Chris Palmer (Junior Level Designer) - I like to find seemingly small design choices that can make a big difference for players with accessibility needs. Hannah O'Hare (Technical UI Designer) - Accessibility considerations can benefit everyone and expands a game's reach by first making it possible for more people to play Lottie Wade (Intermediate Audio Designer) - I continue to learn about the ways audio can help with making games more accessible, and I would encourage everyone to do the same. Edward Waterhouse-Biggins (Designer) - In nearly every case, a good design is synonymous with an accessible design.

Sharing Statistics

Finally, following last year’s Sniper Elite 5 statistics, we released even more stats from some of our previous games – Zombie Army 4: Dead War and Evil Genius 2: World Domination – and some updated stats from Sniper Elite 5! Our subtitle usage has gone from 95% last year to 96% this year, and 35% of players are increasing menu text size.

Accessibility stats for Sniper Elite 5. Dialogue Subtitles – 96% of players turned on dialogue subtitles Text Size: 35% of players used an increased text size rather than the default option Aim Assist Enabled - 97% of players used this feature (across all platforms)
Accessibility stats for Zombie Army 4: Dead War. Dialogue Subtitles - 97% of players turned on dialogue subtitles Text Size - 15% of players used an increased text size rather than the default option Auto Reload - 99% of players played with Auto Reload on
Accessibility stats for Evil Genius 2: World Domination. Difficulty Settings - 64% of games played used Easy or Custom difficulty, 33% played on Medium. Power Generation - 81% of games played set Power Generation to easy, which is our most lowered option Forces of Justice - 13% of games played set Forces of Justice to Hard, which is our most heightened option

Accessibility is most beneficial when woven into development, and GAAD is a great opportunity to create events and activities that celebrate and promote learning more.