A Standing Item, Not a Special Case
Accessibility used to appear in games writing as an occasional feature story. At The Evening Report it is a standing item on the review template, filled in for every candidate whether or not the game claims to have thought about it. That change was not driven by policy. It was driven by noticing how often an option added for one group turned out to improve the game for everybody — text scaling that helps a reader with low vision also helps anyone playing on a bus, and a pause that works anywhere helps a parent as much as it helps a player with limited stamina.
This article sets out the six areas we check, what a good implementation looks like in each, and what we count as a partial answer. It is deliberately specific, because "accessible" as a general adjective has stopped carrying much information.
Text That Scales
The most common failure we record is not the absence of a text size setting. It is a text size setting that only affects one part of the interface. A game may enlarge dialogue while leaving item descriptions, tutorial overlays and menu labels at their original size, which leaves the player exactly where they started for the text that matters most.
We check three things. Whether the game respects the phone's own system font scale, which is the setting a player has already configured and the one they should not have to configure twice. Whether an in-game scale, if offered, applies across all screens. And whether the layout survives it — a scale option that produces clipped words or text spilling out of its container is worse than none, because it looks like an answer.
Colour That Never Carries Meaning Alone
Colour-blind support is frequently reduced to a set of palette presets, and presets are useful, but they are the second-best solution. The first is designing so that colour is never the only channel carrying a piece of information.
A matching puzzle where the pieces differ in shape as well as hue works for everyone without any setting at all. A strategy game that marks a hostile unit with an outline as well as a colour has done the same. Where a game does offer palette options, we look for them to cover more than one type of colour vision, and we look for them to apply to gameplay elements rather than only to the menu chrome.
Motion You Can Turn Down
Screen shake, rapid parallax, full-screen transitions and aggressive particle effects can cause genuine physical discomfort, and on a handheld screen held close to the face the effect is stronger than on a television. A reduced-motion setting is one of the cheapest options a team can add and one of the least often present.
We look for it to be granular where possible — separating camera shake from background movement from transition animation — and we note when a game respects the system-level reduce-motion preference, which is the considerate default.
Touch Targets and Remapping
Phones are small and hands vary. The controls we mark down are the ones sized for an idealised finger: a control that must be hit precisely under time pressure, a virtual stick anchored to a fixed spot rather than appearing where the thumb lands, a critical button placed at a screen edge where a case or a curved display interferes.
Good answers here include enlargeable controls, a layout editor that lets the player move elements, a floating rather than fixed virtual stick, and alternative input schemes — tap-to-move as well as drag, for instance — so that a player who cannot hold a sustained gesture can still play. We also note controller support in this section, because for some players an external controller is the accessibility feature.
Subtitles and Sound
Subtitles are well understood for dialogue and less well understood for everything else. A game that subtitles its cut scenes but conveys a critical warning only through an audio cue has left a player without that warning. We look for visual equivalents of meaningful sounds, for subtitle text that is legible against a busy background rather than thin white text over bright artwork, and for the option to adjust subtitle size independently of other text.
We also check the reverse case, which matters more on mobile than anywhere else: whether the game is fully playable muted. A great many sessions happen in places where sound is not an option.
Pause Anywhere
The last item is the one most likely to be missing. A game that cannot be paused during an action sequence, a timed puzzle or a cut scene assumes an uninterrupted player. Real sessions are interrupted constantly — by a doorbell, a child, a stop announcement, or simply by fatigue. A pause that works everywhere, holds the state indefinitely, and resumes without penalty is an accessibility feature and a quality-of-life feature at once.
The Template We Fill In
| Area | Full answer | Partial answer | What we record as absent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Text scaling | Respects system scale, applies everywhere, layout holds | Scales dialogue only | No scaling of any kind |
| Colour | Information carried by shape or label as well as hue | Palette presets for menus only | Colour is the sole channel |
| Motion | Granular controls, respects system preference | Single on/off toggle | No control over effects |
| Touch targets | Resizable or movable controls, alternative schemes | Fixed but generously sized | Small fixed controls under time pressure |
| Subtitles | Dialogue plus visual cues for meaningful sound | Cut scenes only | Audio-only warnings |
| Pause | Works anywhere, holds indefinitely, no penalty | Menu-only pause | Cannot pause during play |
How It Affects a Placement
Accessibility provision is a scored component rather than a note at the end, and it can move a game's position. We are not asking every small team to implement all six areas — several of them are genuinely expensive, and a two-person project that has done three well counts for more with us than a large release that has done none. What we do insist on is that the review says which are present, so a reader can decide for themselves rather than discovering the answer afterwards.
Our score is our own editorial judgement and is deliberately not the store's star average; the two are constructed from different inputs. The weighting is described on how we rate, the desk is introduced on our about page, and related pieces on controls and interface design are collected in the article index.