Over the past few decades, the games industry has been investing heavily in advancing accessibility of video games through hardware, adaptable controllers, and built-in game features. At GamesBeat Summit 2025, Aubrey Quinn, senior vice president for the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), led a conversation about how these efforts continue to evolve. Participants in the conversation included Holly Wescott, accessibility lead at Amazon Games; Dr. Kaitlyn Jones, director of clinical outreach at Warfighter Engaged and gaming accessibility lead at Xbox; and Steve Saylor, player, content creator and accessibility consultant.
Saylor started the conversation by talking about his perspective on accessibility in games in relation to the 2020 release of The Last of Us Part II. At the time, he told the audience, he believed it was a milestone in the accessibility movement for video games. As one of the game’s consultants, Saylor contributed to the development of features that had never been offered before on a triple A game.
“While that game had amazing accessibility, and probably was one of the only games at the time that was mostly fully accessible, the industry wasn’t ready for it yet,” he said. “We had hoped that, okay, now accessibility is here, now we’ll have more games that will have a lot more accessibility features. But here we are, five years later, and we’re still not at that place in the industry where every game that’s coming out is fully accessible.”
The group celebrated the fact that more games include accessibility features designed for a wide range of disabilities. Today many studios are trying accessibility for the first time and there’s progress being made — but some deficits persist about how efforts these efforts continue to evolve.
Saylor approached the conversation from someone who is legally blind: “I get it. There are certain things where technology is not at the point yet to be fully accessible and approachable, like screen readers,” he added. “I’ve been trying to advocate for larger text size. I still can’t believe we’re in 2025 and I see games that have six-point fonts. If you’re doing that and you’re in this room right now — please stop!”
Integrating accessibility goals into development
It comes down to intentionality, Wescott said, adding that the dedicated program at Amazon Games lets developers consider accessibility across the entire development process. The accessibility team’s subject matter expertise can be woven throughout existing workflows right from the start of any project in creative ways.
“It’s about asking questions — what does accessibility mean in games?” Wescott said. “There are really fun, innovative ways to start engaging around accessibility, and then thinking about your title’s genre. What are some points where people can get into the game? Are there barriers to entering the game play? There are lots of questions to ask yourself, but there are also a lot of wonderful accessibility consultants and people with lived experience who can help guide that process. Always ask the disabled player community as well.”
In other words, “Nothing about us without us.”
“What that essentially means, at least in the gaming and technology industry, is that people with disabilities are experts in their own experiences, needs and preferences,” Dr. Jones said. “If we build games based on our own assumptions, we’re not properly serving those accessibility needs and preferences.”
Accessibility changing lives
Warfighter Engaged develops accessible video game solutions on an individualized basis, working with one-on-one veterans who have sustained injuries to identify the best gaming setup for them, based on the kinds of games they like to play. For instance, if they want to play an online game that includes player chat, a mouth-operated joystick would not be the best adaptation, Dr. Jones explained.
Making games accessible changes lives, Jones adds.
“To come back and sustain a traumatic injury, have your sense of normalcy be taken from you, it can be very difficult,” she said. “When you use gaming as that therapeutic modality, you empower people to want to better whatever it is they’re working at. They’re distracted and they’re having fun. It’s been really exciting to see it be used more broadly in the therapy space.”
Accessibility for studios of every size
Working toward accessibility isn’t so resource-intensive that it bars smaller developers from access goals, Saylor added. Indie studios have more freedom to experiment and try things over the course of development.
“If you’re an indie studio, you actually have capability and freedom to experiment and try things as you go,” he said. “There are a lot of resources that are available beyond consultants. Xbox has a great free resource available for any developer of any size to learn how to build things to incorporate accessibility into their games. You can start small and grow from there. Then you’ll be able to get to a point where you’re like The Last of Us Part II or any other fully accessible game.”
The Accessible Games Initiative
In March 2025 at GDC, the ESA, in partnership with about a dozen video game companies, announced the Accessible Games Initiative, a cross-industry tagging system that alerts players to accessibility features in games.
“Those tags are going to help players discover new games, maybe even some indie games that could use a player base,” Saylor said. “I love seeing Xbox having those and other storefronts will hopefully follow suit to incorporate those.”
Standardized tags means that if a player is searching for a game with subtitles, any games that come up in that search will have the technical features they need and expect — customized color contrast and font selection, for instance. Accessiblegames.com offers developer-facing criteria and requirements for adding those tags.
Amazon Games is participating in the Accessible Games Initiative and Wescott provided additional information on the project. “Some of these technical requirements, developers would love to have them ready and available. They want to do this. We want to make sure that it’s standardized and communicated and available for teams that maybe don’t have a dedicated accessibility team. It’s a great resource for people to learn about accessibility, to know that they’ve hit a positive threshold for their players so that they can comfortably play a game.”
The future of accessibility
“I’d love to obviously see accessibility as a standard in the industry in general — every game that’s made, every piece of hardware, every controller,” Dr. Jones said. “But in order for that to happen, we need to have a cultural shift, a shift in mindset when it comes to what accessibility is and what it means to invest in accessibility. It’s not just that you are spending a lot of time to help a very small number of players. Accessible design is good design.”
Some people are born with disabilities, some people acquire them later in life, and aging means reduced vision and reaction times, she added — investing in accessibility now and creating accessible experiences today means futureproofing games for everyone.
“I want to play when I’m 75. That’s my long-term goal,” she said. “But also, you’re expanding your player reach now. Why would you not want to have as many people as possible be able to play something you put a lot of work into creating?”