How Eidos-Montréal's accessibility department works to make games for everyone

When Shadow of the Tomb Raider released in 2018, it was at the forefront of many aspects of accessibility, showcasing how to do subtitles right and offering an in-depth variety of gameplay options. The studio’s latest release, this year’s Guardians of the Galaxy, once again offers a lot of options specific to the game, and so I took the opportunity to talk to Améliane F. Chiasson, Eidos-Montréal’s accessibility lead. (She works with a colleague, Rodrigo Sanchez.)

In the gaming industry, accessibility lead, or chief accessibility officer, is still a fairly new job title. Accessibility officers work in different ways to make a company’s products, and ultimately the company itself, more accessible. Chiasson’s appointment, she tells me, is fairly recent, as the department has only existed since 2020. For Eidos-Montréal, it was a way to formalise a job Chiasson had been doing for years, when she was still working in QA and user research.

“My own interest in the topic, mixed with my own needs and working with players with disabilities made me notice that accessibility is something the industry overall is lacking,” she says. “It’s just something the industry overall needs to catch up on. In the creation of new awards categories for the Game Awards and with media outlets talking about accessibility more, we see the topic is here to stay.”

But Eidos-Montréal and other studios didn’t just happen upon the idea of accessibility. Instead, it took championing by many people. “[For Eidos-Montréal] it was a team effort of various actors within the company,” she says. “We came up with a pitch for the company to approve, with the help of our legal team, which was very knowledgeable about the CVAA, for example.”

Chiasson explains the CVAA – the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act – to me: an act signed into law by President Obama in 2010, it ensures certain accessibility standards for modern communication services. Parts of the CVAA can affect game services like text and voice chat, so part of the business case for the department was to state that it could help with certain regulations the studio was already bound to by US law. Chiasson points out several times that she is very lucky to work in a company where accessibility is an established mindset, although she mentions the need for “frank conversations” on the topic with people to whom the concept may be entirely new.