Press Play for Everyone: The Secret Love Story Between Accessibility and Video Games

Discover the transformative power of accessibility in the gaming world with Verónica Morales Beltrán, an accessibility specialist at Adesso Mobile. Having transitioned from leading localization at Electronic Arts Germany to championing digital inclusion, Veronica reveals how gaming has evolved beyond mere entertainment to become a vital space for connection, creativity, and belonging.

Why do we play games? The answer extends far beyond simple fun. For many, especially those with disabilities, games provide safe communities, opportunities for skill development, and alternative experiences otherwise unavailable. As Veronica eloquently puts it, accessibility in gaming is "very egoistic" – we design for others, but ultimately for our future selves too, recognizing that disability can touch anyone's life temporarily or permanently.

The conversation explores how gaming accessibility has progressed from rigid difficulty settings to highly customizable experiences. Modern games allow players to tailor specific aspects of gameplay to their unique needs rather than forcing them into predetermined categories. Even more encouraging is how major companies like EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, and Amazon Games are now collaborating on standardized accessibility tags – a remarkable example of industry leaders prioritizing inclusion over competition.

Perhaps most powerful is the growing representation of disability within games themselves. Veronica shares her excitement about Nintendo's recent Switch 2 announcement featuring wheelchair basketball, presented not as a special accessibility feature but simply as another game in their lineup – "treating it as something natural, standard."

Whether you're a dedicated gamer, an accessibility professional, or simply interested in how digital experiences are becoming more inclusive, this episode offers valuable insights into how technology can create spaces where everyone belongs. Listen now and discover why the gaming industry might be showing us the path toward a more accessible future for all digital experiences.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome and Introduction
• 2:44 Accessibility in Gaming Communities
• 6:04 Evolution of Gaming Accessibility
• 8:19 Joining the Accessibility Field
• 14:27 Building Bridges in Accessibility
• 19:32 Innovation in Accessible Gaming
• 23:59 Industry Collaboration for Inclusion
• 26:10 Digital Twins and Future Applications

Transcript

Neil Milliken: 0:00

Hello and welcome to AXSChat. I'm delighted that we're joined today by Veronica Morales-Beldrand. Veronica is an accessibility specialist with Adesso Mobile, based in Germany, so welcome, Verónica, it's great to have you with us. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your journey into accessibility and the work that you're doing right now?

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 0:22

First of all, thanks for having me in this podcast. I'm very excited to be here today and to give a bit of visibility about local accessibility in video games. So, being about myself, I am currently working, as you said, as a digital accessibility consultant and we basically help customers and private and public companies to implement accessibilities in their workflow also to check how accessible are their products or their pages right now or their documents, and then we also help them develop in this direction. And before that, I was working 12 years at Electronic Arts Germany and there my role was leading the localization department, so everything that had to do with the languages, recording of the audio and everything that you can basically see in-game. So, yeah, I discovered accessibility I think in 2020, I think and I fell in love with it, and since then, I kind of mixed these two passions video games and also accessibility.

Neil Milliken: 1:24

We've long had an interest in gaming accessibility. I think one of our early guests was Ian Hamilton, who was quoted by our first guest, who we interviewed the other week Gareth essentially working and he produced the first set of games accessibility guidelines. We've had him on a number of times. I love him, just don't go drinking with him, it's dangerous but but absolutely so.

Neil Milliken: 1:48

I think that there's a real connection between the, the disability community, and the, the gaming community, because I know, as someone that is a committed casual gamer, I know that sounds ridiculous because they sound like they're opposite, but I have been playing a lot of sort of mobile games and so on that are designed to be sort of dip in, dip, you know, but they end up sort of actually having communities of people that really get into the gaming and I found that, you know, a huge number of the people that were in my clan happened to be people with disabilities or parents of people with disabilities, and that gaming was a great outlet and a great community.

Neil Milliken: 2:31

So I think that it's a topic really close to our hearts. So, as you said, you, you came into gaming and accessibility through electronic arts. Um, so what were some of the things that you were doing, uh, whilst you were at ea to to, I know you said you were working on sort of localization and language. Well, what were some of the things that you were seeing that were improving accessibility in the, in the titles that you were working on?

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 2:57

so I will. Before I reply to these questions. I will go back a bit to that, what you said as well, because it's very important, like the reasons why people play, because of course, we all play to have fun, but there are many other reasons that they involve everyone, not only people who have disabilities, but also people who at the moment they don't have any disabilities. So it might be this feeling of connection. So we play also to have like a community where we feel safe. We want to, we want also to develop our skills and also we use also video games as a way of expressing art. So, for instance, if I am playing sims, then I might want to have the biggest and most beautiful mansion in my world, or I can have something like I'm living a life that I cannot currently live because of lack of money. So it's also this way of living another world, which is something that I would like to have. So this first of all, and then I'll reply to your question, nate. So throughout the years there has been a lot of movement about accessibility on video games and it has been, I think, the past maybe 10 years. They have been very important. In the last two years, I think they have been like there was a. There has been a big push about accessibility and we see that in many fronts. I mean not only about the way that the games are being made, because they don't only. Let's take, for instance, the difficulty mode, right. So before in the 80s, let's say it was just easy, medium and hard. And now all these things that are attached to the modes, which can be how hard it is to beat a boss, or it can be the number of enemies that you have, how hard it is to beat them this all has been kind of brought dismembered in different sections so that they all can be fed in a different setup which is not static. It's not like easy, medium and hard, but it's something like okay, I'm very good at killing my enemies, but I need more time. And then this is about accessibility providing what the user needs so that they can still play the game, and part of this movement in a positive way.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 5:06

It has been also done through the different companies. I mean first of all the ones creating the video games, so they don't only work on accessibility, but they make accessibility a part of the product and also a part that it's being exposed to the users. Right now we have like pages about a video game. It's not only about the content, but it's also exposed to the users. Right now we have like pages about a video game. It's not only about the content, but it's also about the accessibility features and this gets really engaged, the engagement from different groups of people, be it with people with disabilities or someone else.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 5:37

Or, for instance, a couple of years ago it was one of the Project Leonardo, it was from PlayStation. It was this accessible controller. So it's also about how we interact with the games. Can we interact with them or do we have the usual stiff joystick that I cannot use and I cannot remap? So there have been, there has been many, a lot of movement around it and all of it is playing a big, a big role in into how things are developing. And I have seen, seen yeah, debra.

Debra Ruh: 6:06

Veronica, I'm going to step in here because I love where the conversation is going, but I also want to shift it a little bit because something that I'm fascinated you said early on that you fell in love with accessibility when you joined the field in 2020. And that's just something that I love about that statement is the younger generation that is joining, the young professionals that we see joining this field right now, and, at a time when this field is shifting and changing and people are denouncing it, it's just such an interesting time to be in the field. I'm fascinated with how you shifted into this field and also tying it right back to this really powerful conversation we're having about gaming, because I am not a gamer I don't think and so I'll explain that real quick, in that I am not one that get. My son did it, but he would get the games. My daughter. They were into it but what I am really good at is I'm pretty good at social media and sometimes I swear I think it feels like a game to me, but I might be wrong, but it seems to me, as you're talking about all the different things and you were getting so into it, that I am sorry that I interrupted that because it's fascinating, but it reminds me that, first of all, how important it is to have diverse young voices, younger voices, culturally different voices. But at the same time, y'all have learned and I'm just going to give you you're the entire generation, so y'all have learned so much about gaming and virtual worlds and things that I honestly do not understand because it just hasn't been part of my world. That now should be applied to the AI and to the smart cities and to everything that we're doing to try to change society so that we can all be included.

Debra Ruh: 7:55

It feels to me that the gamers figured out things that we need to apply even more so in the real world. So sorry to take this so weirdly big, but I also wanted to applaud that you fell in love with the accessibility industry. We are so glad because we need so many different voices and cultures and pages in this field, because once again, this is a time I mean. Neil mentioned before we came on air that he was in Berlin at the Global Disability Alliance. There's just so much happening to our field right now and there's so much opportunity at the same time. So I was just wondering if, while you're, you know, changing the world if you wouldn't explore some of that as well. Sorry, big question.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 8:39

Yeah, and related to this, I think that's the beauty about the accessibility field as well, because I don't know a single person who has been doing accessibility from the start, maybe because they were doing accessibility, as it was my case I was a teacher before. When I read about the things from the curriculum to get the CPAC, for instance, I was like okay, I was doing this already with my students. I was trying to give them proper instructions. I was trying to give them, when they made an error, like something useful that they can work on, not just to say like this is bad, yeah, okay, this is bad, but why? Why do I expect about it? So all of these things, I think this kind of like for some people, they come with their jobs that they were doing before and then, little by little, then you discover many different spaces and facets of something else. It can be video games, it can be apps, it can be document, it document incoming and all of it kind of ties together and I think, by talking to my colleagues, my work colleagues and also to the some people from my network, that they, they all come from such different backgrounds and I think is what is making this accessibility feel as such, flourish so much. If we would all come from I don't know being developers, then we would just have this tunnel vision where we are just seeing things with a code, things which are programmatically not being properly done, and so on, but we are coming from other places where we can just say, okay, this is what the standard is, but I can contribute with something else, and I think that's the beauty of it. And if we talk with anyone from here in this chat, some people would have done something previously that was not specifically about accessibility but maybe was related to people, related to help them grow, related to make them flourish or related to establish a product which can be used for more people. That's yeah, that's as simple as that. So I agree that this is.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 10:32

It's very nice and also, I have to say, on the other side. So, as a newcomer, also in the accessibility field, I also have to say that people are really embracing as well. So they are not very. They don't try to build up a barrier, but they try to help you. They try to give you advice, or people have contacted me Can you give me advice? Have you enrolled in this and how you started with it, and I'm super grateful. I am like a coach for them and we just chat, we just think and we just try to make their needs be met so that they can develop in this sense at some point. So I think it's going in both ways that the community is very open to new starters and to people that are coming from other angles, and also that we want to contribute and this is also well seen. So it's the perfect setup, I would say.

Debra Ruh: 11:22

I agree, antonio.

Antonio Santos: 11:24

No, thank you for being with us today, veronica. I'm curious to explore some ideas about how we bring more people to the conversation in terms of accessibility, and how we navigate in a way that we are able to build bridges with other people that work with us. So you have to work with colleagues, you have to work with customers and partners, and now how can we convince them and convert them in order to be on our side?

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 11:59

That's the philosophical stone but the good and the realistic thing about disability is that it's a group of people that we can just be part of this group of people. Very easily we can also leave this group of people. Maybe I broke an arm, then I'm part of the group and not again, but it can be that also. You know like with the age, we are so much used to doing our stuff together I mean alone, book a flight reserve, book a hotel, navigate a city so we are the generation where we will want to do this in the future. So wherever I usually tell everyone that accessibility is also very egoistic I do it for you, but I do it for myself. I do it for myself in the future when I'm trying to navigate a city where I don't even understand are there any stairs here, or is it like a ramp that I can use? Maybe I have my stroller with my kid, maybe I'm coming with a bike, maybe I broke my leg and I need to come in a wheelchair. So all these things that we are doing, we are doing basically for ourselves, and the negative thing is that, of course, we are the ones also bringing bad news, because the teams as such they are very proud of the product they created right, and maybe they didn't thought about accessibility from the beginning. So then we kind of need to get them there as well and, little by little, to make them understand that the way that this can work best the same with localization, the same with security, the same with accessibility is to shift this left of the product and start from the beginning. There is a long way there.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 13:33

Of course, this is a change that doesn't happen overnight and it will be taking some time. But more and more we see that the laws are getting stricter, and so all of these skills that they are learning now for one-off situation, they would also need to implement it in the long run, because if I create a website, okay, fix all the accessibility bugs or issues I create the next website or the next webpage. There we go again. We have the same mistakes. So we need to make sure that this is included from the beginning, and it's also a fantastic chance to kind of revamp also and kind of rework the skills that people had. You know, if I would be a developer developer, then I'm learning about technical things that maybe I didn't know. How beautiful is this? I was doing my job 30 years the same way, and now I have the chance to learn and do something better, which is which will be used for more people, so I think, in the end, it's also like playing good on them as well, you know we have.

Antonio Santos: 14:27

We have some previous guests working on large organizations and in the beginning they were telling us oh, when I started I was feeling a little bit on my own, a little bit isolated, and then I had to find allies in my organization, people that could help me. What were your thoughts on that? Do you feel that that is a kind of a common situation, because sometimes you don't really have an accessibility department, you have a small team trying to fix things all over the place?

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 15:03

So I think it depends on the company and how the company is structured, because, of course, if there are not many people who have disabilities on the upper roles, this is gonna be harder because they are gonna question, like why do you do this, why is it this even important? So that's another topic, like how do we bring these people with disabilities not only to the lower roles, but also to move them up so that they can bring these ideas back to their teams? This is one of the things and and for me, I was really lucky because when I was working with Electronic Arts, one of my coaches she was a Morgan Baker, and she's in the accessibility field for video games for ages now and she's driving it full force. So I was really lucky to be with her and to learn so many things about accessibility in general.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 15:48

So I think that maybe within everyone's company there's someone who knows a bit more. Maybe you can talk to this person and just like a casual chat, like, okay, can you help me? I want to develop on this, and then, little by little, you also discover your way. Maybe this is not you don't want to have this person's job, but maybe they help you get there where you want to be. So I was very lucky and I found very good networking people with whom I could network and people who could help me along the way.

Neil Milliken: 16:16

So, yeah, I think that you're definitely right. The accessibility community of practice is one that welcomes new people in and instinctively wants to help other people that want to reduce barriers that people are facing. I think that also it's a great opportunity to learn new stuff, as you say, because the technology is changing all the time. For someone like me that likes to see new stuff, to stay interested, it's again a great opportunity to play with new things, explore, discover and, as you say, build for my future self selfishly, because I would like to continue doing that stuff and I do think that there is a sort of growing number of people and a groundswell of sort of openness within accessibility. Yes, at one point I think Debra put in the comments that it was almost like it was a sort of guarded secret. You'd have just a sort of small cadre of accessibility wizards and no one else would be able to know anything about the black magic that they carried out. But that's not the case now. Clearly, we have so much work to do that we can't rely on a few very deep experts and, as you say, we having to to shift left.

Neil Milliken: 17:41

I I particularly like the, the idea in gaming that you're inventing something new every time because, unlike websites, which are generally templatized and you know, you have very similar approaches to web pages. You have your transactional pages for online shopping, you have your informational pages, you have your sort of government services and so on. There's similarity between them all. Obviously, there's some differences, but games are very different, right, how you interact, the features that you have, the stories that you have. You've almost got a chance to reinvent accessibility every single time that you're doing it.

Neil Milliken: 18:24

Obviously, there are certain things that you can add in.

Neil Milliken: 18:26

You can make sure that your captions and stuff are large enough to be visible on a high-resolution monitor. You can do all of those things that you talked about in terms of the settings, and I can tell you that I um I, because I'm busy and because I'm tired when I play games, I don't play them competitive as competitively as I used to, because I'm just doing it for relaxation now. So I tend to put stuff on easy mode and I'm sort of half playing and half letting the uh, the game do it for me, because I just, you know, I at 10 o'clock at night, I don't want to be really hard at it, especially when I have to get up again in the morning. So I think that this, this is this new sort of. There's new opportunities and cultures as we develop stuff. So what were some of the the things that you saw that were really innovative in terms of things that were included in in the games where you broke new ground with a new title, because, as I said, each title is effectively an entire new digital platform?

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 19:32

yeah, so just recently, like last week, there was the announcement of the from n, of the Switch 2, which is a console, and then in the announcement I don't know if you have seen it, if not, please go and watch it after this podcast, because that was one of the first times where they used, you know, the Switch. It has two controllers on the side and then you can, with these controllers, you can just play like vertically, horizontally, and now with this Switch 2, you will also be able to use them in another way, as if it would be a mouse, so to say. So you can just wrap them on a surface and then the characters will move. Well, in this launch, it was the first time where disability representation was there, which was amazing. It was like super unexpected. It was about the video game which is called Drag and Drive, so it's about wheelchair basketball, and when they introduced this, they just put the two controllers on the table and they were doing like this.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 20:32

People thought it would be about a DJ video game, because what is the usual thing that you would do as a DJ? Something like this. And then the next it was wheelchair basketball, and this is just amazing. I mean the fact that there's the representation there. It's already like I get goosebumps right now. It's already something that I haven't seen before in any launch of any console, and the way that it's being done is like within all the games, it's just one game more. It's like it's treating it as something natural, standard, and why not? You know like it will also open the view of some people who thought like, do I even play basketball when I'm in a wheelchair? You know like, is it possible to move and then to hold the ball? So it was one of the best things that just happened recently. Veronica, yeah, veronica, yeah, veronica.

Debra Ruh: 21:21

I love, I just love. First of all, please do send us that link, because I do want to watch it. You know what is starting to happen, which I love, especially during these times when DEIA and all that you have all the tax and stuff happening in my beautiful country, the United States. But what's interesting is, like you said, this wasn't expected. They didn't make a big deal, they just did it. And then they exceeded everybody's expectations. Hp just did that with a printer that Steve Tyler bought. He didn't buy it because it was gonna do. He was shocked at how included he was in this. So I'm sort of hopeful, veronica, that the new designers like you, that you're just going to do it just because, like you said, and I've always said this, you're designing for yourself. I've been a programmer for years luckily no more but you're designing for yourself. So I just wanted to stop and say that is such a powerful story.

Antonio Santos: 22:19

Yeah, go ahead, antonio no, no, we're designed to ourselves and to our future selves, right, yes?

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 22:25

yes, yes, yeah, yeah, because we play it now and we will also want to play in 20 years or in 30 years. So why not, I mean? And also like people with disabilities. Some people like they have moderate disabilities and they they lose kind of their skills, you know, and not every day is the same as the previous day or the next day, so it also varies over the time. So it's for them it's even more important to feel connected, to feel part of that they are within a community, to feel that they belong, because maybe for them, leaving the house and going to a playground is not possible. So we are just giving with video games. Of course, the fun stuff that we are all link, as a first thought, with video games, but it's much more than this and I think, little by little, people are starting to notice as well that video games are very powerful and they are not just like a thing that people play on the side, but because they are really gamers, that they love what they do, they love their communities, they make friendships and they it's as worthy as face-to-face interaction in real, in real life, like yeah, so, and if I may say something also, that's very happened recently that I think it's amazing.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 23:33

It's many companies, like the biggest companies on video games like ea, ubisoft and Nintendo and so on. They got together and they created like an accessible games initiative, and so what they are doing is that they are providing. They go together to investigate, okay, how can we make our games more inclusive? And this starts just by showing how inclusive is a game. I don't want to buy the game and then realize after I spend 60 euros that I cannot play the game. So this information is being kept with some tags, and so they are. They are now all having the same terminology so that when someone goes into a virtual shop and then they want to buy the game, then they will have this tax. So it's a auditory things. They are working or subtitles, or speech to text or text to speech. So all of this is coming and it's a huge thing.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 24:22

And this is also another um, another reason why it's moving so fast in in accessibility, because it's not like gatekeep this for me. I'm just keeping it for me and nobody else needs to know about this task. No, no, we are getting together as the main companies amazon games and ea and so on and we are all making it together as a team, not just, like you, are my competence and so on. It's for the good of our players and I found this initiative. Like you, can hardly see things like this happening happening on other areas, or at least I don't know of them. If they are, please share.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 24:59

But I found it super. They have been working very hard and they don't impose this to the other developers. They have these tags. They are voluntary. If they want to be used in their sites, they can use them and if not, not. But it's also great. Like I'm a disabled gamer or I just want to see which accessibility features there are. Why are they called different? It's also like a way to standardize it and to give it like the same name to everything. So this just happened, I think, one month ago or two or three weeks ago, and I think it's worth mentioning because it's one of the best things that has happened.

Antonio Santos: 25:32

I was at an industry event in Germany last week and one of the topics like some companies are bringing forward is the next step of digital twins within industrial worlds where we're able to simulate a factory, where we're able to create a building within the kind of industrial metaverse type of environment where you can basically simulate everything that you do in a factory or in the building. How do you see transitioning from what you learn in accessibility, in gaming, transitioning into the industry and to these new ways of working where you are able to simulate business and activities?

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 26:10

Yeah.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 26:10

So I think with the simulation, it needs to also take into account, not like the standard player or the standard user, but, as always, like they say, say like nothing about us without us. So if you want to make this simulation kind of work, you also need to have the representation of the different disabilities or the different people who would be interacting with it. So it goes also hand in hand. Yeah, I think that's the most important that people are consulted through disability consultants. They are also out there and that they also are open to feedback, because sometimes we create something with our best intentions, right, we think like, okay, we do it, and then we just launch it and then we get the feedback.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 26:48

And the feedback maybe it's not as expected, because maybe we oversaw something, and it's totally fine. As long as we can, just we're open to take this feedback, analyze it and also implement it. Just we're open to take this feedback, analyze it and also implement it. Maybe not now, maybe in a patch, or maybe in some somewhere else at a certain point. So it's also like to give the space for this feedback that can also make our product grow in terms of usage, but also in terms of how many, how varied is the player reach that we have?

Neil Milliken: 27:16

excellent and, yeah, I think that the initiatives around labeling is super. I mean, the games had so much more variety than the video industry, because that was one of the last industries that had that kind of labeling for things like closed captions and subtitles and so on. But that list of I think it's about 25 different labels is really quite impressive. Thank you so much for your time today and for your insights and sharing with us. We really look forward to continuing the conversation online. I also need to thank our friend at Amazon and MyClearText for keeping us online and keeping us captioned and accessible. So thank you very much.

Verónica Morales Beltrán: 27:57

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me and, yeah, let's keep on conversations. Thank you.