Steam Accessibility

On the most popular video game digital storefront, how do disabled players find video games that they can actually play?

Table of Contents

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Role
UX Researcher
3-person team
Software
Figma Jam
Skills
Usability Studies and case testing
Quantitative Analysis
Mouse-tracking

Accessiblity Starts Before You Press 'Play'

High Contrast options with individually-customizable color values and the option to desaturate the background...
...leads to a much more simplified visual hiearchy, easily identifying the player character and enemies.
In the past five years, an increasing number of video game developers have started to design with disabled players in mind, including accessibility settings like colorblind modes and button remapping. But far before a disabled user can look at a game's Accessibility Settings screen, they have to figure out if a game they want to purchase has the right accommodations for them. I joined a team of 3 UX Researchers to conduct a usability study of Steam, the most popular digital storefront for video games, to find out how a storefront can communicate which games are accessible.
Accessibility Philosophy
‘Gamers with disabilities’ covers a huge range of people with different disabilities and different accommodation needs. Anyone with a mismatch between a design and their abilities can benefit from accessibility accommodations. For that reason, we framed our research statement as thus: How do disabled users find games to purchase that have the right accommodations for their needs?
Defining the research question:

How do disabled users find games to purchase that have the right accommodations for their needs?

What accommodations does this particular user need in order to play?
What issues does the user encounter when navigating Steam in order to purchase a game they can play?
Where does a user look first to find information on a game’s accommodations?

Creating a User Flow- Where do Users Look for Accessibility Info?

We first created a user flow for the entirety of the Steam website to find out where users could possibly go to look for accessibility information. The most interesting section of the site is Game Curators.
Steam Curators: “Curators” recommend games based on their personal criteria. Though Curators pages are difficult to navigate to, disabled Curators pages were one of the only places we found actual info on accessibility.
User Flow- where do users look for accessibility info?
Figma File

An Exercise in User Frustration- the Usability Study

Example User Tasks

"Imagine it's a Saturday afternoon, and you're in the mood for a new game. Find a page on Steam that includes info about accessibility settings."
"Your friend has heard good things about the screen reader settings in Forza Horizon 5. Find out if your friend can play this game."

Participants

We screened for 5 participants based on whether they used accessibility settings when playing video games, such as controller remapping or subtitles.

Interviews

We asked our participants to complete a variety of tasks, such as finding a game with accessibility settings that they could use. ioGraphica was used as a mouse tracker to understand where participants were keeping their mouse throughout the session. After completing the tasks, we completed a semi-structured, 15 minute interview.

We used mouse tracking software to map where the most common places users would go to in order to find accessibility information. We found that the searchbar and the right sidebar were the most common places on any given screen.

Findings

Recommended Solutions

Inadequate Searchability
There are many context-dependent searchbars in Steam, and users weren't able to use any of them to search for accessibility info.
Add Accessibility to Existing Searchable Tag System
Buried Information
The only reliable source of accessibility information (The Curators section) wasn't designed for that process and was buried behind a login screen.
Standardize and Require Accessibility Info on Game Pages
Reliance on User-Made Content
Some users had created robust info in the Curators section for some disabilities (like color-blindness), but it was sporadic and difficult to find.
Add Vetted Accessibility Curators to Main Game Page

Conclusion: The Accessibile User Journey is End-to-End

Making accessibility settings available to users before they purchase requires several systems to be redesigned. Game developers or expert users need to publish the information, Steam needs to display it, and users need to be able to search for it easily. Steam is made up of a complex design system that has been built up over two decades of development: I would guess that sections like the Curators used to be supported, but it's usability design has been neglected over the years. It can be difficult to support every feature included in a website. But the changes to accessibility that we've proposed would vastly improve the usability of Steam for all users, not just disabled ones.

So many great strides have been made in recent years by video game developers to make their games have colorblind features, sign language, assist modes, alternative ways of communicating audio information, or even full audio-only modes: their hard work should be easy to find for people who need it!

When you think about the entire end-to-end journey of a video game user, the accessiblity of the storefront experience is obvious.
© 2023 Hayley Pike
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