Accessibility Matters is a short opinion series, where Sarah and Marti share their opinions on accessibility in various areas of board game design, development, sales, and promotion. 

So, Sarah and I wanted to start this series off with a bit of an introduction. I want to start off by saying that neither one of us are professionals in board game anything. If you didn’t know, I’m a freelance writer with a Master’s in Communication Studies (marketing/PR). Sarah is a special education paraprofessional currently finishing her teaching degree.

Open Seat Gaming has (and always will be, likely) our “side thing.” It’s where we share about our love for this crazy hobby and let people know what we think about different games that we come across (both review copies and not).

But, we do believe that board gaming could greatly benefit from a multidisciplinary approach to things. You’ve likely noticed that a lot of people in the board gaming industry come from other areas of study. We’ve met engineers, IT professionals, teachers, college professors, and a number of other professionals that definitely bring that angle to their games and gaming.

We have always tried to discuss the level of accessibility in all of our reviews – it’s something that we both pay attention to. But, I don’t think many people realize that accessibility is not only about considering things like color blindness, low vision, dexterity issues, and other disabilities. They’re a huge part of it, but they’re not the only thing.

So, in this series, we hope to put a spotlight on those different areas of accessibility and how game designers, publishers, developers, marketing professionals, and even gamers themselves can help make gaming more accessible to everyone.

It may take a bit to finish this series. Sarah’s back in school, and I’m in leadership at our church. So, life is crazy busy sometimes. But, we think it’s important, and are going to strive to make this series as comprehensive as possible so that people could possibly use it as a reference for game design, promotion, and development.

We hope that you find this series both informative and interesting. We hope that we are able to clearly bring our areas of expertise to people and make gaming a fantastic place for everyone!

Game On!
Marti and Sarah