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Criteria & Method

Accessibility Checks a Small Puzzle Game Can Actually Pass

Accessibility is often treated as a budget problem. Most of the checks that matter for a puzzle game cost almost nothing, and they are all observable from the options menu.

Board: Isidor Selection Editorial Team·4 min read·Published 2026-11-07

Accessibility is the criterion most often dismissed as out of reach for small teams, usually with the phrase “we do not have an accessibility expert”. The Game Accessibility Guidelines make that objection harder to sustain, because the list is explicitly organised by how difficult each item is to implement, with a basic tier described as easy to implement, wide reaching and applicable to almost all game mechanics.

That tier is the useful place to start for a desk that wants an assertable, checkable finding rather than a wish.

Start from the tier, not from the aspiration

The Guidelines split recommendations into basic, intermediate and advanced, and group them by impairment area: motor, cognitive and others. Basic items are the ones a two-person studio can plausibly act on, and — crucially for a judging rubric — they are the ones an assessor can verify from the product without interviewing the team.

Basic motor items in the published list include:

  • an option to adjust the game speed
  • a toggle or slider for any haptics
  • interactive elements and virtual controls that are large and well spaced, particularly on small or touch screens
  • an option to adjust the sensitivity of controls
  • interface areas reachable using the same input method as gameplay
  • controls as simple as possible, or a simpler alternative
  • remappable controls

Every one of those is either in the options menu or it is not. A record can state which are present, which is a stronger finding than any adjective.

The zero-cost cognitive items

The cognitive basic tier contains items that are mostly about writing and layout rather than engineering: avoid flickering images and repetitive patterns, let players progress through text prompts at their own pace, include interactive tutorials, use simple clear language, allow the game to start without navigating multiple levels of menus, use simple clear text formatting, and use an easily readable default font size.

For a text-heavy puzzle game this list is close to a full accessibility audit. If the tutorial text auto-advances on a timer, item two fails. If the game opens onto a six-level menu, item five fails. Both are fixable in an afternoon and both are observable in a minute.

The intermediate tier includes several more that matter for puzzles specifically: provide a choice of text colour with a low/high contrast option as a minimum, ensure no essential information is conveyed by text alone and reinforce it with visuals or speech, provide a means of practising without failure, indicate or allow a reminder of controls, and give contextual in-game help.

The measurable standard for contrast

For anything built as a web page, the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines supply numeric thresholds that a small team can test with a browser and a free contrast checker.

Success Criterion 1.4.3 requires the visual presentation of text and images of text to have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, with large-scale text at least 3:1, subject to listed exceptions for incidental text and logotypes.

That single number catches a common aesthetic mistake: pale grey on off-white, chosen because it looked elegant on the designer’s monitor. It is measurable, and it does not depend on taste.

Success Criterion 1.4.10 adds a layout constraint: content must be presentable without loss of information or functionality, and without requiring scrolling in two dimensions, for vertical content at a width equivalent to 320 CSS pixels and horizontal content at a height equivalent to 256 CSS pixels, except for parts that require two-dimensional layout for meaning.

A grid puzzle whose board is a legitimate two-dimensional layout gets the exception. Its surrounding interface usually does not.

Colour as a solver, not a decoration

If a puzzle’s solution depends on distinguishing two states by hue, then colour is carrying information, and the criterion is not only about readability. The guidance’s intermediate cognitive tier asks for distinct sound and music choices per key object or event, and also that no essential information be conveyed by text alone.

The same logic runs in the other direction: no essential information should be conveyed by colour alone. A game can pass a contrast test and still be unsolvable for a colourblind player, and a record should separate the two observations.

A short checklist for a small puzzle game

A short list of checks worth having ready for a small puzzle game:

Check Where to look Cheap fix
Text contrast Menu and help screens Darken the body text
Remappable controls Options Key-binding screen
Text speed Dialogue and tutorial A “continue” prompt
Hint or practice mode Main menu A sandbox toggle
Colour-only cues Everywhere Add a shape or label

None of these requires an expert, and all of them can be checked in the first ten minutes of play.

How the finding is written

The honest form is a presence list, not a grade. “Remapping: present. Text size: adjustable in two steps. Hint system: absent. Contrast: body text measured below the AA threshold on the help screen.” A reader can check every clause. A studio can act on it. And the desk never has to claim an expertise it does not have.

Sources

Written for: A small studio or a judge who wants a practical, observable accessibility checklist that does not require an accessibility expert or a large budget.

AI assistance recorded as: AI draft, not edited. Review status: approved.