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The Fight for Accessibility in Games | Sacred Symbols+ Episode 106

Please welcome Joel Dembe to Sacred Symbols+. Joel is a retired Canadian paralympian, an accessibility advocate, a writer, and a gamer, and he reached out several months ago to see if we could talk about accessibility in games. I said yes, obviously, and the conversation's timeline has been accelerated thanks to recent events in the industry. As chatter about accessibility for the disabled becomes louder and more pronounced, so too has pushback, arguing that making games 'easier' or 'dumbing them down' is detrimental for all. But is that really true? This is a complex issue worthy of an equally complex chat. We hope you enjoy it.

Comments

Anonymous

Super insightful and awesome guest.

Caleb Greer

Dope and necessary conversation.

Ryan Harvey

This guest is so thoughtful and articulate, great job interviewing as well Colin, was a pleasure to listen to. 👍

Christopher Morgan

Wow absolutely Blown away. Great conversation. Thank you Colin for doing this interview.

Aaron Merrick

This was a great episode. I really think you should make it freely available on your YouTube channel so as many people as possible can learn from it. If even one developer hears it and is inspired to put more effort into accessibility, that would be great and important.

Tristen Wilbers

Wow, this was probably the best conversation I've heard on accessibility in the games space. Extremely elucidating

Joe

Fantastic interview, really likeable guy and as you said Colin, opened my eyes to a few things too.

TheSilverLabGuy

wow, I learned a great deal! So much we don't think about! Thanks

Your Boi Nicky V

What a lovely man! This was something different and a huge eye-opener. Thank you Colin.

BettyAnn Moriarty

What a wonderful conversation! Joel is not only well versed on accessibility but he’s super inspiring as well.

Anonymous

What a great insightful conversation, a big eye-opener to accessibility in gaming. Joel was such a good guest made me even want to educate myself more in this subject for the future.

Ian Andrews

Brilliant episode. Very interesting and informative. My daughter has disabilities and I haven’t even begun to think about so many points Joel raised. Very impressive man.

Ian Andrews

And you’re interview skills are perfect. How you do these not in person are amazing.

Tony Rivera

You know.. as I listen to this conversation, the game The Surge came to mind. As a Dark Souls fan, I was drawn to it, and I still have yet to finish Surge 2 (it's freaking hard LOL) - but the intro to The Surge was interesting in that you start out in the wheelchair, and as morbid as it may be, you are splicing limbs off your opponents to attach armor sets onto your Exoskeleton. I wonder if Joel had ever played that game or at least experienced the intro. In a weird way, it's a sentimental intro to a hardcore game (some Avatar vibes too for sure). Great conversation, and wonderful to meet Joel. Thanks for these great interviews, Colin. Really great stuff.

AaronElWhite

Such good episode. I really appreciated Joel's perspective. Like Ian above me said, he brought up so many things that I've never even had to consider because of my own mental and physical health.

BlindRiot

A stand out episode, we can all use a little perspective sometimes. This gave me a few new angles from which to consider accessibility.

Wayne Moss

This was a very interesting episode it definitely opened my eyes to accessibility issues that I hadn’t thought about.

Anonymous

As a wheelchair user that has mobility issues and the use and control of both fine and gross motor skills, I am grateful that you where willing to have this conversation. I am in my mid 40s and have loved gaming since my early childhood seeing the Atari 2600 for the first time. I think too often as gaming has advanced throughout my life, I has seen the industry and "gamers" equate an increase in a games input and control complexity with an increase in that games' quality.

Andrew Gambill

Great show, gave me a lot to think about and really opened my mind to this topic. If there was ever an episode to make free I'd definitely recommend this one.

Guybrush Threepwood

I found this interview to be super fascinating. As an aside, I opened up settings for The Ascent, and I noticed they have TONS of options for subtitles - size, opacity, background opacity. But then when I went in and played the game, ALL THE OTHER TEXT in the game is TINY. I just found it so odd that they would not give players a way to adjust the size of ALL THE OTHER TEXT (of which there is a fug-ton) also. In fact most of this other text is more critical to the gameplay than cut scene subs. I don't think I would have even been thinking about things this way, before I had heard what Joel had to say.