How can you design mobile accessibility for gaming and education?

1 Why gaming and education?

Gaming and education are both domains that can leverage the power and potential of mobile devices. Gaming can provide entertainment, social interaction, and cognitive stimulation, while education can offer learning opportunities, skill development, and career advancement. However, both gaming and education also pose some accessibility challenges, such as complex interfaces, fast-paced interactions, and diverse content formats. Therefore, designing mobile accessibility for gaming and education requires careful consideration of the user needs, preferences, and goals, as well as the technical and contextual constraints.

2 How to apply accessibility principles?

Designing mobile accessibility for gaming and education should begin by following the general accessibility principles and guidelines that apply to any mobile app or website. This includes providing clear and consistent navigation and layout, using sufficient contrast and color schemes, offering multiple input and output modes, supporting text resizing and zooming, implementing captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions, avoiding flashing, blinking, or moving elements, and testing with different devices, browsers, and assistive technologies. By adhering to these principles, you can make sure your mobile app or website meets the minimum accessibility standards and complies with the relevant laws and regulations.

3 How to adapt to different genres and formats?

Designing mobile accessibility for gaming and education requires adapting to the specific genres and formats of your mobile app or website. For instance, when designing a mobile game, you should consider its mechanics, rules, genre, style, feedback, rewards, difficulty, progression, customization and options. Depending on these aspects, you may need to provide adjustable game speed and difficulty, alternative control schemes and gestures, haptic and auditory feedback, in-game tutorials and hints, and player profiles and preferences. Similarly, when designing a mobile educational app or website, you should consider the learning objectives and outcomes, content and activities, assessment and feedback, pace and sequence, and support and resources. Depending on these aspects, you may need to provide multiple content formats and modalities, interactive and adaptive learning, accessible quizzes and tests, progress tracking and reporting as well as additional learning materials and tools.

4 How to involve users in the design process?

The final step to design mobile accessibility for gaming and education is to involve users in the design process. This can provide valuable insights into their needs, preferences, goals, and challenges. Additionally, user involvement can help evaluate and improve the usability and accessibility of the mobile app or website, as well as user satisfaction and engagement. User involvement can take many forms, such as user research and analysis, creating user personas and scenarios, user testing and feedback, co-designing with users, and advocating for user empowerment. Ultimately, involving users in the design process can create mobile apps and websites that are accessible, inclusive, user-friendly, and centered around the user experience.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?