Video game consultants like Laura Kate Dale came into 2023 with a lot of hope. Since 2020, accessibility in games had become a mainstream discussion, bolstered by high-profile releases like The Last of Us Part II, and it appeared things could only get better. Yet, as the year drew on, she says, “there started to be signs that, behind the scenes, accessibility advancement was slowing down.”
Now, that momentum has come to a relative standstill. Consultants speaking to The Verge paint a picture of repetitive conversations, fighting to maintain basics that should already be established, and a sense that the broader industry has taken its foot off the gas after the early months of the incipient covid-19 pandemic provided a real sense of hope that accessibility was here to stay.
“The gaming culture of that time is a reflection of catering to the disabled experience, because accessibility was sorely needed by everyone,” says Kaemsi, an online broadcaster. “The rise of accessibility back in 2020 was almost a promise that, when we started recovering from the lockdowns, the world would start considering everyone in all facets of living, and all we needed to do was give people a chance to recover from having to deal with such an unprecedented time.”
But as that recovery set in, the world instead brute-forced a return to 2019 norms. Following lockdown successes such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the bubble burst. As industry-wide downscaling started partway through 2023, dedicated accessibility roles were among the first culled to save cash, according to Dale. “Gigs started to be cancelled without clear explanation,” she adds, while those accessibility champions that remained were told “their budgets were shrinking, or they were expected to fight harder to justify any new or more experimental investment in accessibility.”
Things are yet to improve. Layoffs and studio closures continue, while consultants who led the charge in 2020 are still fighting the same battles years later to maintain basics. “It can feel a little defeating to focus energy on fighting for standardizing things already proven to work and proven to win positive headlines from the games media,” Dale says.
Despite the media’s value as a way to start, and maintain, accessibility conversations, those positive headlines are also disappearing in a media landscape reckoning with its own calamity (most recently evidenced by Polygon’s sale to Valnet). As consultant and content creator Steve Saylor suggests, outside tired cyclical discourse such as difficulty in Souls-likes and yellow paint, accessibility topics have mostly fallen out of public consciousness. “There’s no nuance to that conversation,” he says. “People understand accessibility is important, but they’re not willing to learn more beyond that.”
“We’re still trying our best, but it’s rough.”
But that coverage is also critical for moving accessibility forward, providing publishers with a marketing incentive for accessibility features. “The less publishers are imagining their big stab at getting similar press coverage, the less they seem willing to take a chance on a feature nobody’s tried to offer before,” Dale says. She points to the extensive coverage The Last of Us Part II received for its accessibility prior to release as a major motivator for others to follow suit in the immediate aftermath.
Now, she adds, accessibility consultants are increasingly employed in scaling back accessibility, with the least backlash, to help mitigate the industry’s lockdown-era overspend. This creates an environment that isn’t conducive to change and improvement, and saps energy from an already frequently exhausted community. Professional opportunities have dried up to the point that many advocates are looking elsewhere for work, where only a few years before there was hope accessibility could become a full-time pursuit.
“We’re still trying our best, but it’s rough,” says Saylor, before adding that he’s barely had consultancy work over the past year. “I don’t know when it’s going to pick back up again. It’s been getting worse since 2023.”
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
Even when the call does come, often those offers will end up being rescinded. “I’ve had at least three major AAA studios offer me accessibility consulting work in the past 18 months,” Dale says, “only for them to cancel the planned consulting work because the budget for that work was withdrawn by management.”
“People in the accessibility community are tired,” Kaemsi says, summing up how many speaking to The Verge feel. Nor does it look to be improving in 2025. As relations fray between Donald Trump’s government and other nations, with many countries issuing travel advisories to the US, “it’s getting harder and harder to even potentially cross the border,” Saylor, who lives in Canada, says. “90 percent of my work was in the US and if that’s gone, I don’t know what that means for me going forward.”
Similarly, with so much of the gaming industry tied to the US, federal-level attacks on anything resembling inclusion in the name of pushing back against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies (DEI) are making it dangerous for many advocates to continue fighting for inclusivity.
There is still some cause for hope
A side effect of so many consultants leaving the industry is that they’re also taking much of their knowledge with them. While many studios are maintaining features implemented in previous games, Dale says “knowledge of why those features are implemented, and why they’re handled in a specific way, is being lost.”
Per multiple sources, this has only worsened as the industry embraces contractors instead of full-time work, in which consultants are employed for a single project and then let go, often without leaving a record of their knowledge and practices behind, making communication even harder.
Dale cites multiple occasions where she was brought in to consult on separate projects for a studio only to find information wasn’t being disseminated across teams. “The end result is me being brought in to teach the same lesson more than once, a sign that somewhere along the line that knowledge isn’t making it from one project to the next,” she says.
Yet there is still some cause for hope. Games like South of Midnight, which includes among its impressive accessibility suite the ability to skip boss fights, prove that accessibility remains a concern for many studios. In announcing the Switch 2, Nintendo has signaled its first stuttering steps toward a more holistic approach to accessibility after years of stubborn resistance. Elsewhere, major publishers, including Nintendo of America, have agreed to share clearer and consistent information about accessibility on storefronts.
These are small wins in spite of a broader industry slowdown around accessibility. If repetition is one signal of how profound that rut has become, it’s also perhaps an important tool for arresting this decline.
“Being repetitive, asking for features nobody is delivering, and asking for teams to try features until it’s embarrassing not to offer them,” Dale says. “That’s the only way things are going to change.”
