Digital Games Accessibility Introduction to the Special Thematic Session

Since a couple of decades, the video games area have spectacularly grown, and video games are now a genuine cultural and social object. Alongside with the pure entertainment finality, various application areas arose: "games with a purpose" are also aiming to teach, to monitor, to train, to treat, etc. By the way, people who play games became more diverse: from the younger to the elderly, nowadays everyone is potentially a gamer. This wide diversity of users and products has led to pay a specific attention to their accessibility: how to ensure that nobody is not excluded from this strong cultural movement? The US legislation, through the CVAA, increased the focus on video/computer game accessibility, but still lots of efforts need to be done, especially regarding mainstream video games. This session aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, to present and discuss new ideas and solutions dealing with video games accessibility issues.