I loved the 2022 edition of the Gaming Accessibility Awards by GAconf!
Hello, dear readers! Last night, Alina and I watched an event that we think deserves to get more attention and recognition from everyone in the Gaming Community.
The 2022 edition of the GAconf Awards was a pleasantly organized event, clean, offering just the right amount of information, and has also proven out to be quite entertaining. For those of you who don’t know yet, the GAconf awards are a continuation of the industry-wide movement to recognize the stellar efforts of people across and around game development to raise the bar for accessibility. There were 18 categories, shortlisted by an expert panel, with winners decided on by a combination of public and jury votes.
Before I move on to talk more about the show, I want to draw your attention to the fact that the IGDA Game Accessibility SIG volunteers have worked since 2003 to aid the game industry in making games accessible for all, regardless of impairments or other limitations.
The awards ceremony was hosted by the legendary blind gamer, Steve Saylor, and aside from subtitles and captioning, the show had ASL, BSL, and fantastic audio descriptions provided by Descriptive Video Works, written by the talented Jennissary and voiced by award-winning accessibility consultant and all around nice guy, Brandon Cole. He is the man who made it possible for blind gamers to play The Last of Us Part I and The Last of Us Part II, after working together with the fabulous team at Naughty Dog.
I was really happy to see both The Last of Us Part I and God of War Ragnarok receiving awards, plus Sony Interactive Entertainment and Naughty Dog being recognized for their efforts of bringing accessible games to everyone. A personal favorite was to see Mila Pavlin, former of Santa Monica Studio, now with Monolith Productions, rewarded for her tremendous passion towards accessibility with MVP award for most dedicated developer.
The awards were announced by important members of the Disabled Community and allies. We had individuals who are blind, deaf, people with cognitive impairments, with motor disabilities, and so on. These segments proved to be quite emotional for me because as you well know by now, I’m blind myself. Also, we had allies from Sony PlayStation, Ubisoft, Xbox with Phill Spenser, and speakers from other publishers recognizing fellow gamers and journalists with these awards.
I encourage you all to check out the event, a link for the version with Audio Descriptions is embedded in this article.
I am so proud to be part of this community! After going blind, many of these kind and nice people welcomed me with open arms and I’m honored to call some of them friends. They know who they are. I will do my best to continue raising awareness about accessibility and I’m sure that if we all work together, all the barriers will be destroyed and the future will be a bright one for everyone!
I’m sure these wonderful people will be able to continue making a difference in the Gaming Industry and will brake down barrier by barrier, one by one until everyone can game on a level playing field.
I want to congratulate every developer, publisher, journalist and everyone else involved for the tremendous difference that they are doing for the disabled community. You showed me that there is gaming after going blind and I truly appreciate that. Disability happens when accessibility doesn’t, but with people like you around, with time, hopefully, each of us will get to feel less and less disabled.
Victor Dima
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