Playing Against Ableism: Disabled Player and Developer Approaches to Videogame Accessibility

Utilizing a grounded theory methodology and conducting interviews with videogame developers and disabled players, this project thinks beyond videogame accessibility as it typically understood—in-game settings such as subtitles or colourblind filters that players can turn on/off. While academic research is beginning to address the intersection of videogames and disability, studies often investigate videogames’ rehabilitative potential, upholding a medicalization of disability that sees disability as deficiency. Other studies that address videogame accessibility seek to understand barriers disabled players face resulting from a lack of in-game settings. What is missing from the current scholarship, however, is an investigation of videogames, accessibility, and ableism conducted from a critical disability studies perspective, a gap this project situates itself within. Since minority players have historically been excluded from the videogame industry and mainstream videogame culture, focusing solely on accessibility via settings runs the risk of providing access to an otherwise exclusionary media in which disabled people are not valued. As such, this project more thoroughly investigates the relationship between accessibility, the videogame industry, and ableism by drawing from critical disability scholars such as Sami Schalk, J. Logan Smigles, and Dan Goodley, who attend to the social values that normalize a nondisabled citizen (or player) as ideal. The research questions for this project are: how do player and developer approaches to accessibility differ? Do industry understandings of accessibility lead to normalized ways of playing that favour nondisabled players? How do disabled players negotiate these restrictions? This dissertation found that developers are aware of the unique experiences of disabled players and that both groups are critical of lackluster accessibility efforts that do not seek to make the industry a more wholly inclusive place. Furthermore, while there are increasingly more accessible videogames, a nondisabled player is still often favoured, something that players negotiate by creating their own forms of access and acting as accessibility advisors. If societal ableism is reflected in how we typically understand/approach videogame accessibility, then videogames consequently offer a way to shift how we think about accessibility more broadly if we attend to more nuanced player and developer approaches to the topic.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph D

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Media Studies

Grantor dc:publisher

The University of Western Ontario

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Escobar-Lamanna, Juan

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Blackmore, Tim
• Preston, Jeff
• Hill, Heather

• Videogames
• disability
• accessibility
• ableism
• critical disability studies
• disability media studies

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14721/39475

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uwo.scholaris.ca:20.500.14721/39475