Rose’s autism and rheumatoid arthritis can make it difficult for her to form friendships and move around in the real world.
“I come to work and I'm the only one with a walking stick,” the 28-year-old from Brisbane told SBS News.
“I do struggle to read between the lines. People sort of say one thing and mean another and I'm sitting there going, ‘I'm not a mind reader’, but apparently everyone else is.
“They (my colleagues) are all lovely about it, no one makes me feel awkward about it, but you do get that sense of like, ‘I'm really alone in this’.”
When she gets home and starts playing one of her favourite games, it’s a different story.
“Gaming itself has been a way for me to experience life,” she said.
“I can't do everything I used to be able to do when I'm living my day-to-day life, but the second that I jump onto a video game, I can do anything, I can go anywhere, I can be anything, and it's very liberating for someone who in reality can't do a lot.
“I get to see all my friends ... it's like I'm not alone there."
Some of those friendships have formed through the Xbox Ambassador Accessibility Explorer Path.
“It's been so inspiring to get to know the other disabled Xbox ambassadors,” she said.
“We're all pushing for more accessibility in gaming, so it feels like you're part of something bigger, and that's exciting.”
Rose is a member of the Xbox Ambassador Accessibility Explorer Path. Source: Supplied
Anita Mortalini, director of accessibility at Xbox, said forging connections is a key component of the program and gaming more broadly.
“Our goal is to empower players around the world to play the games they want, with the people they want, on the devices they want,” she said.
“Gaming is about the power of play and connection, so when we add accessibility features into games or software or hardware, it means more people can play, and gaming is all about playing together and having those connections."
Is digital media accessible?
How accessible different kinds of digital media are depends on what disabilities the person using them has.
The latest accessibility evaluation from WebAIM, an organisation that encourages the creation of accessible internet content, found 96.3 per cent of the top million website homepages didn’t meet the internationally recognised Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
It was a slight improvement from 2022 where 96.8 per cent of the top million web pages didn’t meet standards.
The three most common failures found were low contrast of text (83.6 per cent), missing alternative text for images (58.2 per cent) and links that didn’t work (50.1 per cent).
Nicole Lee, president of People with Disability Australia, said people with disability can face multiple barriers when it comes to accessing the digital world.
These can include difficulty with vision, hearing, mobility, and motor skills, while issues such as financial instability can limit access to assistive technology.
“It can be financial instability and not being able to access the cost of internet access or assistive technology, but also a lot of us aren’t very confident in the online world,” she said.
"Depending on somebody's disability, whether it's their vision, hearing or motor skills, it adds layers in being able to engage with the online world and gaming and technology that a lot of people take for granted and has opened up our world."
She said when spaces are not accessible, people can become isolated or left behind.
“It means you get left out of spaces, you get left behind in things or you don’t engage, so while for some people this has opened up their world, for others it has added a barrier,” she said.
Nicole Lee says there can be multiple barriers to digital accessibility. Source: SBS News / SBS News
“Back in my day, if you went to an options menu on a main screen on a video game, the options were mute or unmute, and subtitles or no subtitles, if you were lucky,” she said.
“Nowadays, you have options and then you have like 10 different sub-options and then they have sub-options, and the ability to really customise your gaming experience.”
That makes it easier for her and other gamers with disability to have the same gaming experience as everyone else.
“In the past, maybe I would have looked at that and gone ‘Oh, I probably couldn't play that, I won't touch it,” she said.
“But now I can play it.”
There are still areas that need improvement though, Rose said.
“From an arthritis perspective, it'd be really nice if more games included options where you didn't have to mash three or four different button combos to get a move,” she said.
“For autism, I think it'd be really great to have the ability to really limit things like flashing lights and sounds.”
The Xbox adaptive controller was designed to improve accessibility in gaming. Source: Supplied / Ogilvy
“Including people with disabilities as part of the entire development cycle … and being able to co-create with people with disabilities to really bring that feedback to life in games,” she said.
“And the discovery of accessibility features, making it really easy for everybody to know which disability features exist, how to use them, and announce them as part of the big announcement of the game.”
“Include accessibility throughout the entire cycle, from development and coding to marketing and the announcement.”
How can digital accessibility be improved?
Rose said there still seems to be an attitude among a lot of people that doing “just the bare minimum for accessibility” was enough.
“It's very much like, ‘I've ticked the box, and that's it, I don't care’,” she said.
“I think that everyone would benefit if you put a little more thought and time into it.”
Ms Lee said while technology is improving, accessibility often appears to be an afterthought.
"Apps and smartphones are certainly becoming more intuitive with voice-to-text technology and accessibility features that are built into a lot of smartphones," she said.
“But we still have the issue with lots of websites that unless they’re a disability-specific website, they don’t think about accessibility … unless (they) are at that higher level of accessibility standards, those sites become inaccessible."
She said it is important to increase digital accessibility while also ensuring people with disability have improved access to the outside world.
“Digital accessibility is a really great way of opening up people’s worlds, but also ensuring that is not becoming their entire world,” she said.
“We still need access to the community around us … we still need human-to-human contact.”
Global Accessibility Awareness Day is marked on the third Thursday in May each year.
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