Accessibility removes barriers in the workplace, with game design processes being enhanced by better development tools, improved recruitment procedures, and an increased awareness of inclusive practices. This position paper describes accessibility within the field of digital games – with a special focus on game developers with disabilities – based on challenges and opportunities at workplaces described in a previously available summary of an industry roundtable in 2024. The aim is to find ways forward by raising awareness about issues of inclusion and accessibility based on views from people in the game industry and related research. The paper presents seven thematic concepts and related principles: 1) proactive, inclusive leadership; 2) better structure at workplaces; 3) adaptation with remote work; 4) normalise and facilitate adaptations; 5) inclusive employment processes; 6) sustainable advocacy; 7) accessible tools for inclusive game design. This paper also presents a tentative model where the needs of employees are the input while policy, methods, tools, advocacy and stakeholders provide support, and accountability provides control, which combined may lead to proactive inclusion. Our position is that while game accessibility has advanced significantly in the industry in the last decade, there is a need for more research about inclusion and accessibility in game design processes within game companies.

A common challenge for people on the autism spectrum with intellectual disability, is indoor navigation and related daily activities, as found in previous research. In this paper we report on co-design of assistive augmented reality applications, where the goal is to help people on the autism spectrum to gain more independence in their daily lives. This study is based on initially two full-day workshops with staff only, followed by ten individual workshops with the end-users and their staff at day centers, using a mix of methods and prototypes. The results show a clear potential of augmented reality as assistive technology for indoor navigation, depending on individual capability and/or complexity of environments, as well as for other activities. We also found that new barriers may arise, which are discussed for future research.

EyeCompass is a novel free-eye drawing system enabling high-fidelity and efficient free-eye drawing through unimodal gaze control, addressing the bottlenecks of gaze-control drawing. EyeCompass helps people to draw using only their eyes, which is of value to people with motor disabilities. Currently, there is no effective gaze-control drawing application due to multiple challenges including involuntary eye movements, conflicts between visuomotor transformation and ocular observation, gaze trajectory control, and inherent eye-tracking errors. EyeCompass addresses this using two initial gaze-control drawing mechanisms: brush damping dynamics and the gaze-oriented method. The user experiments compare the existing gaze-control drawing method and EyeCompass, showing significant improvements in the drawing performance of the mechanisms concerned. The field study conducted with motor-disabled people produced various creative graphics and indicates good usability of the system. Our studies indicate that EyeCompass is a high-fidelity, accurate, feasible free-eye drawing method for creating artistic works via unimodal gaze control.

Synthesizing realistic clouds is a complex and demanding task, as clouds are characterized by random shapes, complex scattering and turbulent appearances. Existing approaches either employ two-dimensional image matting or three-dimensional physical simulations. This paper proposes a novel sketch-to-image deep learning system using fast sketches to paint and edit volumetric clouds. We composed a dataset of 2000 real cloud images and translated simple strokes into authentic clouds based on a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). Compared to previous cloud simulation methods, our system demonstrates more efficient and straightforward processes to generate authentic clouds for computer graphics, providing a widely accessible sky scene design approach for use by novices, amateurs, and expert artists.