Cutscenes
Games are a versatile storytelling medium, but make sure you make your cutscenes accessible via voiceovers and captions so everyone can follow along.
Best practices for cutscenes
Any time you need to convey a message to a player, whether that’s through cutscenes, dialog, tutorials, tooltips, or in-game actions and speech, always “say it to the player twice,” in two different mediums. That means every message should use both audio AND visual communication.
- Contents
- Audio
- Subtitles
Cutscene Audio
Voiceovers
Make sure every piece of text in your game has a voiceover. If you don’t include audio, you exclude blind players or people with limited vision from understanding your game’s story or playing the game altogether.
Terraformers is a game that is completely accessible to the blind because its story, instructions, and mechanics are all narrated by voiceover.
Screenreaders
If recording audio seems too daunting a task, consider adding screen reader compatibility. People with low vision or blindness commonly use screen readers for every day tasks like reading websites and text messages. Screen readers read text out loud using synthesized speech. For Windows, JAWS is the most common screenreader, and it has an extensive scripting language that can be included in your code. Apple’s iOS has screen-reading built in too. [...]