Easy Accessibility #1: Lefty Mouse Support

It’s not a newfangled invention.
This Mouse Options screen is 20 years old.

Some studies place the number of left handed people at 15 to 25% of the population. Not all of these people use the mouse with their left hand, and fewer still swap the mouse buttons on their mice (it’s an option in the control panel, and has been available since Windows 2.0). So let’s say a mere 2% of the population has their mouse buttons swapped so right-clicking is left-clicking and vice versa. That still means you’re alienating 2 out of every 100 customers if you ignore their choice. And every DirectX game ignores this choice unless you explicitly support it.

This is extremely common in games, and very aggravating for people like me who use swapped mice. The otherwise-excellent game Bioshock did not support left mouse swap. It was possible to reconfigure what the mouse buttons do in the 3D world, but not in menus or in the hacking mini-game. More annoying was that during the hacking game, right-clicking auto-completes the level, and blows you up if you didn’t finish it properly. So every time I started the hacking game, I’d click something and boom! I’d blow up. I quit in irritation from that more than once.

In a game where I can kinda-sorta remap the mouse buttons most of the time, I can survive, albeit with ill grace. In a game where I can’t remap the mouse buttons at all, I just don’t play. Clicking the left mouse button with my left hand is awkward and uncomfortable, and I’m not going to do that for prolonged periods just to play your game.

The tragedy here is that supporting lefty-swapped mice in DirectX apps is incredibly trivial.

Make this call whenever you receive a mouse event.

BOOL IsMouseSwapped = GetSystemMetrics(SM_SWAPBUTTON);

If the function returns true then turn a left event into a right event, and vice versa. That’s it! That’s all there is to it. (Don’t worry about changing in-game help text to say “right-click” instead of “left-click” and vice versa; we lefty-swapped users think in reversed terms anyway, so you’d just confuse us.) You don’t even need to cache this boolean because clicking happens relatively infrequently. Just call this function!

GO ON, Go and add it now. Do it now, I’m waiting. Add it!

Did you add it? One damned line. It’ll take you less than five minutes. Seriously, go add it now.

Easy Accessibility #2: Red-Green Colorblindness

About 8% of males and .5% of females have some variety of colorblindness. That means that 8.5 out of every 100 players cannot easily distinguish certain colors, most often red from green. If you use colors alone as key indicators, these people will not enjoy your game as much and many will leave.

The most important way to support colorblind people is to not make two icons that differ only in color. Some games have a green indicator for “safe” and a red indicator for “danger”. This isn’t good enough unless the shape of the indicator changes also.

Ask around for somebody who’s colorblind to evaluate your GUI.

Don’t guess, just check. Every medium-sized company I’ve worked for (and many of the smaller ones) have had someone who was red-green colorblind on staff. They don’t always advertise this fact, but if you ask for help discreetly you can get them to evaluate your UI and icons for major problems. Once you’ve found the problem icons, it’s very easy to tweak them a bit to make them more distinguishable.

Easy Accessibility #3: Deaf Players

Just make sure your cinematic sequences and all crucial in-game audio has subtitles. This one might take a bit more work, depending on your game engine, but 2% of the populace is deaf or has significant hearing impairments. That’s another 2 people out of 100 that can’t enjoy your game because they can’t tell what’s going on. Not to mention all the people who need to occasionally play games with the sound off … ever tried to play a game in the living room while your parents or siblings or spouse are asleep in another room? Subtitles are handy.

They Don’t Tell You That’s Why They’re Leaving

Almost none of these people are going to come to you and say, “I quit because you didn’t support lefty mice|colorblind players|subtitles.” They just go away. Only invested hardcore players will come to your message boards and whine about problems. But these people typically don’t become invested players — your game’s inaccessibility keeps them from getting into the game, so they just go do something more rewarding.

If you don’t do these three things, 12% or so of your potential audience is just going to wander away, and you’ll never know why.

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