ATU805 – PlayAbility with Alex Carey

Hi, this is Alex Carey, and I am the Founder and Strength & Dexterity Barrier Expert at PlayAbility Consultancy. And this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology, designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 805 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on October 30th, 2026. On today’s show, we are super excited to welcome Alex Carey, Founder and Strength & Dexterity Barrier Expert for PlayAbility to the show as we talk about accessibility in gaming. We also have a quick story about screen bans in school and how these can affect individuals with disabilities. Don’t forget, listeners, we always love to hear from you. If you’d ever like to drop us a line, you can call us at 317-721-7124 or shoot us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Thank you so much for listening, and let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

If you happen to have questions about Assistive Technology, we have Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions or ATFAQ. The show is hosted by Brian Norton and features yours truly, along with Belva Smith, as we all talk about Assistive Technology with questions that come in from email, phone calls, and other means. We also don’t always know the answer, so it’s very important that we have listeners that can help us out with some of those questions. Because while we like to think every once in a while that we may know everything, we’re proven wrong almost daily on that one. Make sure to check out Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions wherever you get your podcasts.

Listeners, I had a friend of our program in this show, Joe Ricker, reach out to us about an exciting opportunity that he’s looking for folks to participate in. So Joe runs At Ease Orchard here in Indiana. Now, At Ease Orchard is dedicated to supporting veterans through hands-on experiences in farming and beekeeping. They’re focused on giving back to fellow veterans as they transition back to civilian life. Well, Joe recently received brand new donated pairs of Meta glasses to distribute to veterans with visual barriers to live more independently. Individuals are eligible to receive a pair of the glasses if they are a US military veteran and if they experience significant visual impairment that interferes with daily living, including legal blindness or low vision.

Now, this can include conditions such as macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, ocular brain injury, stroke, and many other vision and eye conditions. So if you or someone you know is a veteran that experiences significant visual impairment, you can reach out to Joe at joericker@ateaseorchard.com for more information. I will also make sure to add his email address, as well as a link to At Ease Orchard down in the show notes so that you can easily click on those and get ahold of Joe to find out more. But again, if you or someone you love is a veteran who also happens to be low vision, have a visual impairment, anything along those lines, and are interested in obtaining a pair of Meta glasses, please do reach out to Joe.

So listeners, on today’s show here in a little bit when we talk to Alex from PlayAbility, will be on gaming accessibility. But I thought for our story today, we would provide a little bit of information on something that at least I see coming up here in Indiana and I’m sure coming up in some other places as well. And it’s screen bans in schools and how these affect students with disabilities. So the link I’m going to give you is from over at JD Supra. This is actually from the Chambliss, Bahner & Stophel PC Law Firm, with just some information about what to do if your school has a screen ban, and maybe if you have a student with a disability and what that might do and what you do in order to be able to ensure that you’re still able to get the accommodations that you need.

So screens are in the news quite often about maybe folks being on the screen too much, maybe schools use screens too much. I’m not sure. There’s a lot of different debates. I know here in Indiana, for a lot of the schools, there might be a phone ban or they are trying to make it to where maybe they’re not using the screen the whole time or not all homeworks on a screen, some other things. They’re very different. I haven’t seen a full on ban on screens, at least here in this state yet, but that doesn’t mean that the different areas and everything else might not have these. The issue of course that this brings up is what if my accommodation, my assistive technology, what I use to access my learning is on that screen? Which one overrides? Which rule is actually there? So this talks a little bit about some of the things that are there, what people can do.

And really, just to kind of quote it, it says, “As screen restrictions sweep through schools nationwide, students who rely on assistive technology could be caught in the crossfire.” And it gives you a story of one student in California and their experience using assistive technology, and then what happened when that was taken away. And then it really gets into maybe the most important part is just, what’s the law? Just to go over what it says here, that under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA, every student’s IEP team must consider whether the child needs assistive technology as part of their free, appropriate public education or FAPE. If it’s necessary, the school must provide it at no cost to families.

So in the case of a school-wide phone ban, it would not override an IEP. So I guess that’s where the important part comes. If you’ve got a section 504 plan or an IEP, this school-wide ban would not override it. The IEP or the section 504 plan would override that school-wide ban. So if the phone or a tablet or another device is used as assistive technology and there’s a school-wide ban on those devices, as long as that was written correctly into the IEP, the section 504 plan, it should still be allowed.

Now, being able to make sure that’s done can be a challenge. So what it does is it gives you actually some information down here. It says, “What can families do?” It says, “If your child’s school adopts a screen ban, steps to take would be to review the IEP, request an IEP or 504 meeting, gather your supporting documentation, make sure everything’s in writing, and then if the school doesn’t comply, to escalate.” So of course, we don’t ever want to give you legal advice here, but kind of the same advice that you’ve probably been doing for a while. If you’re a parent of an individual with disability or an individual with disability, advocate, advocate, advocate and just keep on trying to get those supports that you need.

So anyway, I know this has come up in some places. I know just from calls, from emails, from information that I hear, this is a problem that’s come up in a few places. So I’ll put a link to this story over in the show notes. Again, this is just to hopefully help you out if you do see this kind of issue come. Most schools, most educators, most folks I’ve worked with are pretty understanding and usually know the difference between a school-wide ban and someone who’s using that device to access their education, but not always. So I guess this just gives you some tools. So I don’t know. What are your thoughts? If you want, you can always send those to us at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org and we’ll put a link down in the show notes so that you can check out the story for yourself.

Listeners, gaming is a giant industry. Gaming is also a great way for people to come together, whether it’s video games, board games, or card games. These are wonderful social activities that could be done in-person or online. And our guest today is Alex Carey from PlayAbility, and he is here to tell us about how they’re making sure that gaming is open and accessible to all players. And I am looking forward to learning more about it all. Alex, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. Before we get into talking about PlayAbility and all the great work you all are doing, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, sure. So my name is Alex. I live up in Vancouver, Canada. I have been working on and off sort of in the video gaming space for… Time is hard to remember, maybe like eight or nine years coming up here. So yeah, I have a company where I work with some really cool folks called PlayAbility Consultancy. And like you said, we try and help video game developers make their games more accessible to everyone.

Awesome, awesome. And Alex, I guess, as the founder of PlayAbility, what really led you to found it?

Yeah. So I’ll give you sort of the pitch here. So let me tell you a story. So being the stereotypical Canadian that I am, my first love was hockey. All I wanted to do was play hockey with my friends growing up. Now, unfortunately, as far as I know, skate attachments haven’t been invented for wheelchairs, so that wasn’t something I was necessarily able to do.

Yeah.

So that just made me feel left out. It made me feel excluded. But what I was able to do was play NHL 2003 for the original Xbox.

Okay.

So I could have my friends over and I would play game after game after game of NHL 2003. And that really stuck with me through the years that through games, I can feel included. So as I grew up and wanted to try and work within the games industry and find sort of a little niche, that led me to found PlayAbility Consultancy and bring together an awesome team of people to try and offer feedback and testing for video game developers across a broad spectrum of lived experience. So yeah.

Nice, nice. No, I love it. I guess, being a little bit south of you, I learned how to play football surely by Madden. I don’t remember what year, maybe a few years before that, but the same kind of thing. But also, I will say that NHL hockey on Xbox is when I finally learned what icing meant. And I’m sure in Canada, maybe this is that kind of stereotype, you probably knew by the time you could talk, but it took me a while to actually learn what in the world that meant whenever they’d call that, as I was trying to watch the game. So we’re so glad that you decided to bring this on, just to make it more accessible for other players. So I guess, I’ll start us off with maybe what are some barriers to gaming kind of broadly speaking, that you all see?

Yeah. So how we sort of classify internally, and this isn’t totally true when I give talks and stuff on this. I like to preface this part with like, this is not an actual true thing. It is just a framework that helps do the work, if that makes sense. So I’m going to say a thing here and everyone should take it with a grain of salt. But like, broadly speaking, there are eight categories where barriers can exist to gaming. So we like to call them strength and dexterity, blindness, hard of hearing or deaf, colorblind, emotional, cognitive, low vision, and speech. So those are sort of like, broadly speaking, the eight areas. And then within those categories, there’s lots of overlap and whatnot, but we sort of have people on our team that represent with lived experience each of those areas. So we have someone who’s blind and plays video games, someone who’s colorblind and hard of hearing.

And yeah, and our team sort of helps developers identify potential barriers within their games that might exist. So within my own lived experience, I use a power wheelchair for mobility. And as I’m playing games, my hands can get really tired as I’m playing games. So having things like being able to automate certain actions or being able to change what buttons do, what things on a controller or on a keyboard and mouse are some ways that we offer feedback to be able to help overcome those barriers.

Awesome. And that sounds like such a simple accommodation, I guess, just from a developer standpoint. Now granted, I don’t want to code or develop a game on my own, but just it sounds like, and I’m sure you probably have talked about this and I know we talk about it all the time, that the accommodations you make for an individual are helping so many more people.

For sure, 100%. Yes.

Yep, yep. And Alex, I guess, let’s say that I am a game developer in some kind of way. At what phases of production or design can you and your team really help and become involved?

Yeah. So accessibility can be implemented at any stage in development, but where it’s most impactful is near the beginning. There’s sort of a joke or like a piece of knowledge from the games’ accessibility scene where they talk about accessibility as sort of like making a blueberry muffin, where once the muffin is cooked, it’s really hard to put more blueberries in it. So if you start from the beginning and plan to put those in, it helps a lot. Yeah. So starting earlier really helps for development. And sometimes as a developer, you can get these really awesome, easy wins where, for example, something like in colorblind accessibility. If you plan ahead and are knowledgeable about where potential barriers to that may exist, you’re able to just design your game in a way that supports colorblind issues without having to necessarily make any changes.

Nice. Yeah, for sure. I’ve used the same analogy, but I think I did it with somebody in web and document, web accessibility and they’re like, “Well, when should we think about it?” I’m like, “I don’t know. Is it easier to build the foundation of the house before or after you build the house?” I was like, “It’s a lot more expensive to put the foundation under it after you built it.” But yeah, same kind of thing. If you barely bake it in there, it really works well, instead of just kind of an add-on or slapping it on. And I’m kind of hungry for blueberry muffins now, unfortunately.

So Alex, you said you’ve got a great team of folks with lived experience that can really speak to this. So what does, I guess, the process look like? So let’s say I’ve got a game idea, I’m in development and everything, and I’m like, I want to make sure this is accessible when I come to you, what does the whole process of working with PlayAbility look like?

Yeah, for sure. So every game is sort of unique and has its own unique… So typically, what we do if a developer is looking for specific types of feedback, they sometimes might come to us and say, “Hey, we think there might be an issue here for maybe hard of hearing or deaf accessibility. We have this really integral audio component and we would like someone to be able to offer feedback to see if this is going to potentially be an issue.”

So we get outreach like that sometimes, where a developer comes to us and has a very specific need. And sometimes a developer, it’s a little more open-ended where they might want more like a full accessibility audit, where they come to us and say, “Hey, we have this video game where maybe early in development,” like I said, which is great. “Can you look over our documentation?” If they have a first playable prototype or vertical slice that’s playable, they might offer that to our team and we would play through it and document maybe where we might see potential pain points, or where there might be maybe future issues and that type of thing. And then we would write that all up in a big fancy PDF and send that back to them. And then if they have the sort of budget and time, which is really lovely, maybe we do a few rounds of that, where they would implement some of our feedback. We would play through it again, or check over that changes and sort of hopefully narrow down the potential issues.

Nice, nice. I love that they can come at pretty much any phase and be able… Like you said, it’s much easier at the very beginning, but they’re still able to come, especially if they maybe see something that might be an issue, but also be able to come to you and say, “Hey, are there any issues? What are we not thinking of? What are we not looking at?” And bringing those to your attention. Alex, I was doing a little bit of research. I saw that PlayAbility goes beyond just making sure that games are accessible, to also kind of ensure that characters with disabilities are portrayed accurately. Can you tell us a little bit about this?

Yeah, for sure. So representation is really interesting, where maybe I pull from a personal story here in a slightly different medium. But I know when I was a kid, one of my favorite shows was Avatar, The Last Airbender. And one of the reasons that was the case is there was a character named Theo, which was the son of the mechanist who was in a manual wheelchair. And for whatever reason, even though I’m not in a manual wheelchair, just even that very closeness to representing my own lived experience in this fantasy world made it so… It was so meaningful to me just to see someone that even remotely looked like me and portrayed in this fantastical setting that… Yeah, it just meant a lot to see myself in that space, and then he gets to drive a tank and go fight the Fire Nation and it’s awesome. It’s my favorite show.

It’s a good show. We could spend a lot talking about that if you want to.

It’s so good.

Yeah.

But in terms of games, yeah, there’s a real lack of disabled representation within games. So when it does occur or when someone wants to write about a character with a disability or a character that is being portrayed within that medium, I think it’s really important that that’s done from a place of knowledge and a place that really touches on lived experience, so we’re not perpetuating stereotypes about various disabilities, or just more true to the actual lived experience of people. And I think that’s incredibly important in art, is to reflect true human experience back at an audience, right? What are we doing if we’re making the art that’s not speaking to real human truth? I don’t know.

Yeah, most definitely. And kind of like you said, especially by involving characters that have different lived experiences or different experiences, you’re bringing so many more people in. So as long as you’re portraying them correctly, it really helps you even bring more people into the fold and more people into whatever it is you’re trying to create.

Yeah, for sure. I think part of our work at PlayAbility is because everyone on our team has lived experience within their various barrier areas, it allows us to speak from a place of that personal human experience of having a disability within those areas. So yeah.

Sure. Yeah. No, that’s awesome. I just had to ask you because as I was researching, a lot of the things were things that I would think of, that I would think you’d look at and be able to help with. But I love that you offered that as a kind of service as well, just because that is a very important piece, a very important part, but something that I had not seen before. Alex, I’m sure you’ve been doing this a while, kind of like you said. Do you have maybe a story that really sticks with you of maybe something that you were all able to help develop or help change or help influence in the world of gaming that you could share with the listeners?

Yeah. So early sort of in PlayAbility’s… or early in our story, I guess, we had the opportunity to offer some feedback for the video game, Golf With Your Friends, which is a really fun mini golf party game. It’s lots of fun. People should check it out. And through the work we did there, we were able to help a little bit in terms of making the game more accessible. And what was really cool was recently, I’ve been helping a local charity here in British Columbia do like a gaming night for the members of that group, and they were playing Golf With Your Friends. And I was like, “I helped to make this possible.” It was just this very cool full circle moment. So yeah.

That’s awesome. That’s really cool. Alex, while we’ve got a little bit of time left, I guess, what is one thing that you wish all game designers knew about accessibility while they were creating their games, or something that… I know it’s hard to narrow it down to one. There’s so many things in there, but what’s one thing that you wish they all knew? Or if you could drop one little thought into all of their heads at once, what’s one thing you want to make sure they knew as they’re creating their games out there?

Yeah. So maybe this is a bit of a cop out, but I would actually love to see the game engines themselves. So things like Unreal Engine or Unity, sort of like the third party tools that lots of people use to develop games, I would love to see their default projects have things like button remapping in that original sort of default example project. Because I think when the next generation of kids, so someone who’s 14 or whatever, says, “I want to make a video game. Let me download the tools. I’m going to do this.” And they open that project and they see that some of these options are based into the very first thing they ever see, I think that would be a tremendously impactful way, and also a very actionable thing that we could do to make accessibility sort of part of the default, part of that vanilla flavor of game development. So yeah.

Yeah. If you make it to where they have to actually physically turn it off, it’s much easier to make them turn it on, that’s for sure.

100%, yes.

I don’t think that’s a cop out at all. I think that’s a wonderful, wonderful answer. Alex, if our listeners want to find out more about the great work you all are doing, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Yeah. We’re not on a ton of social media stuff, but you can check out our website at play-ability.net. And if you’re interested in learning more, you can check out there. We have a quarterly newsletter we put out, with just sort of cool stuff that’s going on in games accessibility. So feel free to find that on our website and sign up if you’re interested.

Awesome. We’ll put links to that in the show notes so that folks can easily find it. Well, Alex, thank you so much for coming on today, for telling us about PlayAbility, for talking about not just game accessibility, also representation in gaming and so many other great things. Love the work that you all are doing and thank you so much for coming on.

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me.

Do you have a question about Assistive Technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or INTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto, for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update, and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.