DEV Community: Catherine Starobor-Strakhova

Disabled video game characters

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 08:46:41 +0000

Hi! I brought an unexpected topic - I'm not going to teach you how to make accessibility, but I'm going to tell you about some of the video game characters I've "met" personally.

Billie Lurk (aka Megan Foster) from Dishonored is the main character's ally, a highwaywoman who loses an arm and an eye during the game. She is also the right-hand man of the gang leader, and later becomes the captain of the ship. She grew up in the slums as a child and ran away from home.

The Joker from Mass Effect was born with brittle bones, they broke even before birth. Thanks to the medicine of the future, he survived, although he moved with difficulty. Nevertheless, he became an excellent spaceship pilot, surpassing the instructors in skill. Later, he actually fell in love with the ship Normandie, which the heroes of the game fly on, but was refused an appointment due to his illness. Then he hijacked a ship and demonstrated his skills during the chase. After returning to the station, he was almost court-martialed, but it was decided that such a pilot should remain on the ship.

Max Hass from the game Wolfenstein - this super-strong man suffered a serious head injury and doctors had to remove a third of his brain. Nevertheless, he became a valuable member of the Resistance in the fight against the Nazis.

Senua from the Hellblade games is the heroine of a game based on Celtic and Scandinavian mythology. Incredibly atmospheric, it tells about the journey of a girl who is experiencing psychosis. The game is praised for its realism - the developers consulted with Paul Fletcher, a professor at the University of Cambridge, studied materials about the disease and communicated with those who experience auditory hallucinations. According to the developers, they wanted to make the players feel the same way that people with psychosis feel, and judging by the feedback from the players, they succeeded. The game has garnered many awards and positive reviews.
What kind of characters have you encountered?

In the picture: promo material of Hellblade with a portrait of the main character.

Accessible esport

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 07:00:54 +0000

Hello everyone!
Are there any analogues of the Paralympic Games in esport? Yes, they exist! And I want to tell you about them.

More and more people are getting into games, and more and more developers are making games more accessible, which attracts more and more people to games. Thanks to technology, diseases that interfere with the passage of computer games cease to matter. This also applies to those games that are often used for competitions.

Thanks to this, it becomes possible to create a world of games without barriers in esports.

Research shows that esports also helps people with disabilities successfully integrate into society, improve their quality of life through the development of cognitive and intellectual skills, as well as communication.

In Japan, there is an esports team called Matagi Snipers, with an average age of 67. Their goal is to become a team that even their grandchildren respect. They see their mission in uniting different generations on the theme of love for esports. It is important that esports helps to develop cognitive abilities, which can delay the development of dementia. And due to vivid emotions and communication, older people do not feel disconnected from the outside world.

In 2022, the Permastunned team entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest esports team for people with disabilities. Participants not only want to win, but also strive to raise awareness of players with disabilities through their work. There are some problems with professional tournaments - for example, the organizers do not allow the use of special equipment, as it may give an unfair advantage to players without disabilities.

In the picture: photos of the Matagi Snipers members.

Emotional game accessibility

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 18:57:35 +0000

Hi! Today I got to one of the most difficult aspects and called it "emotional accessibility". There is an emotional design of digital products, which means that it should also be accessible to many users, including computer games.

Since I came up with such a concept (Google couldn't find any mentions, but if you come across it, be sure to share it in the comments), then explain it to me. So, I'm going to talk about the fact that games should be passable emotionally, and not just through control from a gamepad or keyboard, through game mechanics or sound and image settings.

🧘‍♂️ Some people are looking for a way to relax and therefore choose games with relaxing gameplay without pressure. An excellent representative of such games is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where you can customize your islands and interact with characters in a relaxed atmosphere. The Journey game allows you to explore the world around you, and in Sky: Children of Light, you can take another player's hand and travel through the worlds together. By the way, this game helped me a lot in self-isolation in covid - I talked to people from different countries in it and we were very supportive of each other.

⚔ On the other hand, a player can strive for dynamic gameplay, but dislike challenging monster fights. And here the already widely used difficulty settings come to the rescue - the enemies' health decreases, your damage increases, and therefore it is much easier to go through battles. In Dragon Age: The Veilguard and some others can disable the death of your character altogether.

🩸 There are also impressionable people who are nevertheless interested in playing a certain game. They make it possible for them to turn off blood splashes - for example, in the games Fallout and Assassin's Creed, Elden Ring. In the re-release of Dead Space, they went further and made a setting for censoring particularly violent scenes, which led to discussions about whether such an option was needed in a horror game.

🕷 Some developers have thought about arachnophobia. In Hogwarts Legacy, you can replace the spiders with a rather funny entity with a reference to Ron's fear (at the same time, the sounds from the spiders will change). Not everyone appreciated this appearance, a couple of my friends had to switch to standard spiders because the creature with glowing eyes and roller skates was more frightening. But in Lethal Company, you can simply replace the spiders with the inscription "Spider", which delighted the fans of the game.

In the picture: spider-inscription from the game Lethal Company.

Article in Russian on Telegram: https://t.me/vkluchatel24/417

Simplifying the visual information on the screen

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 06:39:19 +0000

Cover image

Do you know the situation when you want to play a game after a hard day, but the information is perceived with difficulty? You have to apply additional cognitive effort to pass the levels.

But tiredness isn't the only reason why mistakes can be made despite great efforts to concentrate! It happens that temporary or permanent diseases interfere with perceiving and understanding information - concussion, dyslexia..

In order to simplify the execution of tasks, it is necessary to enable the player to change the attributes of information in the channels in order to reliably perceive and understand it.

Today I will talk about the visual channel of information.

So, in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart game, you can assign different shaders to Interactable, Hazard, and Collectible. Colors can be customized. This helps to facilitate the perception of visual information at very overloaded levels.

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There's also a High Contrast Background setting that desaturates the background and leaves key elements like enemies and traversal objects in full color to help them stand out.

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I Ate'nt Dead

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 17:27:26 +0000

Hi there! It was really hard time for a few months. But now I'm ready to return to my blog and now I'm working on new posts!

Evocore - my new portfolio project

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Wed, 11 May 2022 11:29:38 +0000

Hi! So my next portfolio project is ready)
I started it as a test task for hiring and I got this job! But I liked the task so much that I put together layouts for all the game main screens.
I was lucky to use characters created by the wonderful artist Shen YH (https://www.artstation.com/yh_shen)
I had to use 3D for locations and it was really fun because usually I work with 2D only.

Borderhunt - my new portfolio case

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Sun, 08 May 2022 19:46:08 +0000

Hey there! I just finished the course "Create your own project" and here is a result - the bunch of assets and characters. Just want to show them - it was a huge work to design and paint them.

As a theme, I chose Russian fairy tales. The plot of the game is typical for fairy tales - the main character Alesya goes to the other world to save her stolen younger brother. Her path lies through a forest filled with dangers and secrets. One of the powerful enemies is Baba Yaga Bone Leg, who lives in a house on chicken legs and flies in a mortar.

So there is a fakescreen of the battle

The menu

Characters

Location assets

Thank you for watching!

55 sec about a11y - users (part 2)

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 19:58:13 +0000

Six years ago, a customer came to the company where I worked and asked to create a contact center where absolutely blind people could work. This project started my interest in creating accessible interfaces. And it is very closely related to the interest in users - those for whom we create a digital product - a website or an application.

It is easiest to design for an ideal user - he has excellent health, a good memory, he easily analyzes any information. The device of this user is the latest model, and the Internet never fails.

But in fact, users are much more interesting. Someone has old phones and computers, the Internet periodically lags or is too slow.
For example, literally this morning I ordered a taxi and my Internet on my phone disappeared. I don’t know what the problem was - in the phone or with the operator, but the application suddenly stopped responding to button presses. And at that moment I realized that I made a mistake with the address and I need to cancel the order. I had to reboot the phone, by this moment the driver was already driving to me and I had to cancel the order that was already in progress.

And the users themselves are very different! Some may have vision problems. Blindness and color blindness are usually mentioned here, but besides them, there are cataracts, glaucoma, flies before my eyes .. For example, I did laser vision correction a year and a half ago, before that I saw everything very blurry. And we all know tired eyes after a long day at the computer. Other users may have hearing problems, not only deafness, but also ringing in the ears or room noise that makes it difficult to hear audio messages. Some users may have problems with motor skills - this is partial or complete paralysis, trembling in the fingers. Stephen Hawking was such a user. Another group of problems faced by users is cognitive. These are problems with the collection and perception of information, processing and analysis of data, their memorization and subsequent storage, data exchange, development and implementation of an action plan. Among these users are those who suffer from dyslexia, autism spectrum disorders, and those who are tired and who find it difficult to concentrate on complex tasks.
For example, when a young mother tries to order diapers and medicines in an online store for her sick baby, but is constantly distracted by her child and is tired of a sleepless night. The same users may experience several problems at once. So, in the evening, a tired driver, using a navigator, must focus on the road and on the application interface, and cope with eye fatigue.

To make digital products available to our real users, different methods are used. These methods need to be observed in different aspects of development.

Imagine a wooden barrel. In biology, it is used to show how different aspects of the environment affect a living organism. With the help of this barrel, I will show how different aspects of development affect the availability of a digital product. So, our barrel is filled to the brim with water - these are our happy users. Each barrel board is responsible for 1 development aspect. Here is the UI board - this is how the buttons look, the texts, what colors are chosen .. The second board is responsible for the code. The third is for user scenarios, that is, those interactions that designers have thought through. Let's imagine that the designer picked up bad colors and unreadable texts turned out. In this case, the UI board shrinks and some users flow out of the barrel to competitors. If there are no competitors, then users are left without services or information. If everything is fine with the UI, but the programmer was too lazy and did not add information for screen readers to the code, then the code board decreases and users again leak away - those who use screen readers. With this barrel it is impossible to calculate the loss of users, but it is clear that each board is important. Also, different boards will be critical for different products. For example, the site of an ophthalmological clinic is visited mainly by people with vision problems, they are interested in information about doctors, operations and their cost. In this case, UI boards, screen reader code, and information architecture (which is responsible for providing the right information at the right time) become critical.

In a nutshell - think about real users, what difficulties they face and in what conditions they use your product. Remember that accessibility comes in many pieces.

5 sec about a11y - users

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 19:25:09 +0000

I started the story about accessibility from the middle, sorry for that. So, I'm correcting my mistake!

The story about a11y should start with users, because we add it to interfaces for them. We write apps, code websites and create designs for users.

A11y is needed not for certain groups of users, but for all users - and I'll prove it.

A11y helps people get information not only in the way that is convenient for us. The a11y principles help to solve the problems that the user faces.

These problems can accompany a person all his life - for example, blindness. They may last for some time or until certain conditions are met - this is a cataract, a broken arm. The third group of problems depends on the situation - young mother's busy hands and concentration of attention on the child, the difficulty to hear in a noisy room.

Problems are also classified by the reason of their occurrence - visual, auditory, cognitive, motor.

Often, problems prevent us from getting the experience that we put into our interfaces. And here the a11y principles help: we cannot provide the exactly the same experience for all users, but we can convey the information they need or provide the similar experience.

So, any of us can face accessibility difficulties - they depend on the situation or temporary, while others accompany all our life. And the a11y principles help to provide the information to users with different problems in a variety of ways. It also enriches the user experience for all users, and not just opens up access to information for certain groups.

5 sec about a11y: colours

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 12:59:38 +0000

One of the easiest ways to start adding accessibility to an interface is to start paying attention to the contrast between the background colors and the elements on it.
So, white on white is considered 1:1, the contrast of black and white is 21:1. The minimum allowable contrast in most cases is 4.5:1 - these are the requirements for WCAG 2.1 level AA. There is also level A - it is softer, and level AA - it contains the most stringent requirements.
There are many sites and plugins for checking contrasts, both for the web and for Figma.
Using the rules of the AA level, it is difficult to make airy, translucent interfaces, but you can be sure that the information will be read well on different devices in different lighting conditions and will be available to people with imperfect vision.

My personal project - event

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 20:06:02 +0000

Hi! Today I want to share the event screen.

Artist (girl art) Shen YH https://www.artstation.com/yh_shen

My personal project - offer

Catherine Starobor-Strakhova — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 15:19:25 +0000

Hi there! I'm working on the last screens of my personal project. The last ones - offer and event popups, so here is the offer.

Artist (girl art): Shen YH https://www.artstation.com/yh_shen