Rare Celebrates Disability Pride Month 2024

At Rare, inclusivity is core to how we build games, and as such we’re happy to celebrate Disability Pride month. It’s our belief that when everybody plays, we all win, and enabling as many players as possible to enjoy Sea of Thieves helps us achieve that.

Over 400 million gamers worldwide have a disability, which can be physical or mental, visible or invisible, permanent or temporary. We want to support these people to play our games in the way that suits them best. We do this by listening to our players, celebrating the disabled community and bringing accessibility into the centre of our games, so that all can get involved. No matter their ability, all gamers benefit from a more inclusive, accessible experience, so we wanted to highlight some of our recent accessibility endeavours.

The Sea of Thieves website contains a dedicated accessibility information page, at www.seaofthieves.com/accessibility. This highlights our commitment to an accessible experience, and provides a detailed breakdown of all of our accessibility features. We’ve broken it down into major categories – input, audio, visual, communication and feedback. Disabilities are varied and diverse, and we try to account for that breadth of diversity when building accessible experiences.

We’ve also recently refreshed seaofthieves.com, built from the ground up with a commitment to accessibility baked in. We target the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2, the current gold standard in web accessibility, to provide the best support for those with visual or cognitive disabilities, and those using screen readers.

You might have also noticed our new ‘Reduce Motion’ button. Selecting this ensures that all videos are paused by default, and other animations are turned off. This is helpful for those with motion sickness, vertigo and other cognitive disabilities.

To ensure our website stays on top form, every release is tested both manually and through our new automated test system to ensure once we’ve improved an accessibility issue, it stays fixed!

Sharing Our Learnings

Last year we released a new Audio Aim Assist feature in Sea of Thieves. Built on feedback from blind and partially sighted players, this feature assists with aiming down sights via a clicking sound that changes as the player's aim moves towards or away from a visible enemy threat. This lets players with low or no vision join in on the skelly-shooting action.

To complement this, Rare’s Director of Accessibility, Xander Ashwell, gave a talk at this year’s Games Accessibility Conference, outlining how we made decisions around it. Ever wondered how a radioactive Geiger counter can influence the accessibility of a game like Sea of Thieves? Now’s your chance to find out.

And we’re not done yet. The most accessible games are those where the core game design complements accessible gameplay. A commonly used analogy in accessibility circles is that of blueberry muffins. It’s much better to mix the blueberries in before baking the muffins, instead of trying to push them in afterwards.

However, as a title that's been sailing the high seas now for over six years, we've already done a lot of baking. Where possible, we're still squeezing blueberries back into our already shipped features, whilst making sure to mix them in early into our current batch of new features. We’re continuing to listen and learn from disabled creators and gamers, and using that to improve our own understanding and make better games.

Resources like GAConf’s fantastic backlog of videos, the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines and working with disability consultants with lived experience give us the tools and insight we need to improve.

Giving Back

Alongside the accessibility endeavours in our titles, we are proud to support SpecialEffect, a UK-based charity that specialises in supporting players with physical disabilities to play video games. Developers across Rare take the initiative to organise a breadth of charity fundraisers, from football matches to half-marathons, 24-hour streams to bake sales, to a truly gruelling and monstrous upcoming challenge from our composer extraordinaire, Robin Beanland.

In September, Robin’s cycling an astonishing 980 miles from Land’s End to John O’Groats to raise money for SpecialEffect – you can support him in supporting disabled gamers here!

We’d like to end on a more subdued note. At Rare we were saddened to hear of the passing of one of the gaming accessibility community’s most prominent members, Brandon Cole. Brandon was a blind disability consultant, known for his brilliant spirit and impact, helping series like Forza Motorsport break new barriers in terms of blind accessibility. His work has inspired us greatly, and helped inform how we build our accessible features.

We’d like to pay our respects to his family and friends, and invite you to learn about some of the work he did with Xbox.

Thanks for taking the time to learn about Disability Pride. At Rare, we are committed to supporting the gaming disability community where we can, and building inclusive games all can enjoy.

- Topher Winward, Software Engineer & Accessibility Champion