APX

A design language built from player feedback

Players seek experiences any time they begin playing a game — the experience of socializing, the experience of challenging oneself, the experience of relaxing after a hard day, the experience of escaping into a world where the impossible is possible, and so much more. Games, in turn, give players experiences, and all players seek out combinations of these experiences and more.

Players with disabilities are no different. To even attempt to have these experiences, players with disabilities face extra barriers: things that make common game activities more difficult or potentially impossible for them. With APX, we’ve created an approach that works with your existing game accessibility processes, or can start you on your accessibility journey if you have yet to begin. The goal is to enable you to focus on making these experiences possible for players, allowing them to play the way they need to and want to, while staying true to your team’s creative vision.

Accessible Player Experiences® (APX) is a set of design patterns that empowers game developers to identify accessibility barriers in their games at all stages of development, and to brainstorm solutions to those barriers. Think of these patterns as a set of lenses through which your team can examine your game’s concepts, visual and audio implementation, gameplay mechanics, and more, to find areas where players may face extra challenges due to their disabilities.

APX was created directly from player feedback: information was gathered on a wide range of issues that players with disabilities face in games, then organized into design patterns that present problems, provide examples of why those problems might be a concern, and expose broad categories within which solutions may be found. The key to APX is that you’re no longer designing for specific disabilities — you’re designing for barriers that players with a wide range of disabilities might all have. Designing for the barrier, rather than the disability, makes accessible game design and development into a creative process that revolves around generating ideas alongside your game, rather than an evaluative process at specific milestones.

Two categories, 22 patterns

Since APX has 22 design patterns in total, it can be difficult to know which one to reach for when looking for barriers in different parts of your game. To help with this, APX is divided into two broad categories: Access and Challenge.

Access — the foundation (12 patterns)

Before anyone can play your game, they need access to it: the player needs to be able to give info to the game about what they want to do (through the game’s controls) and get info from the game (typically through visuals, audio, and haptic feedback). If a player can’t tell the game what they want to do, or can’t take in the information the game is presenting, they can’t even begin to play. Access is foundational to accessible game design — if you have limited time, budget, and resources, Access should be your priority.

Challenge — the gameplay (10 patterns)

Once a player has access, they may still face difficulties in playing the game — typically in the same places all players do: the gameplay itself. Reacting quickly, learning and implementing strategies, remembering what’s required, performing actions, and having strong emotional responses to content can all become extra difficult, or potentially impossible, for players with disabilities. This doesn’t mean removing challenge from your game — most players, including players with disabilities, want challenge. It means adding flexibility to challenge, so players can fine-tune the experience to make it playable.

Together, the Access and Challenge Patterns form a design language: a way of talking with your team about accessibility, quickly and efficiently, so you can examine your game for accessibility barriers and brainstorm solutions to them. In other words — the goal is to create Accessible Player Experiences.

Explore APX