Grounded Theory of Accessible Game Development.

Digital games represent a prominent element of popular culture, with the ability to play as well as participate in video game discourse being a matter of inclusion and equality. However, many digital games are inaccessible for players with disabilities. Only a small amount of literature has sought to understand the difficulties developers experience when making an accessible game. This literature indicates that developers experience numerous difficulties making accessible games, yet underlying causes of these difficulties are not well understood. The present research uses interviews and a grounded theory approach to illuminate the experiences that developers encounter when trying to make accessible games. We identify several difficulties that the game developers experience and describe how these difficulties are affected by knowledge and motivations of the individual developer, organisational attributes of the work environment, and the use of external resources such as drawing upon the experiences of players with disabilities.