Meet Ubisoft’s Accessibility Team

Ubisoft's Accessibility team has an important job. They not only work to ensure that Ubisoft games are playable for as many people as possible, but they also help Ubisoft develop internal tools, strategies, and methods to make work at Ubisoft as accessible as possible. The team has steadily grown over the years, recently joining forces with the Diversity and Inclusion team. We spoke with all six members of the Accessibility team to discover how their accessibility journeys began, and why they hope to put themselves out of a job eventually.

Stacey Jenkins - Accessibility Design Specialist

How did your relationship with videogames and accessibility begin?

Stacey Jenkins: I actually discovered accessibility while I was streaming on Twitch! I'd become disabled around 2013 and wasn't able to leave the house very much because of my pain, so I turned to streaming. I found a wonderful community of other disabled gamers that understood what I was going through at the time. Those people opened my eyes to the barriers that they experienced, both in life and in gaming, as well as my own. Understanding those barriers and figuring out how to solve for them was like an epic logic puzzle in my mind, and so my love for game accessibility had really begun.

Tell us about your role on the Accessibility team. What is your specialty/area of expertise?

SJ: I'm the newest accessibility design specialist on the team, and I work specifically with the Paris studio on Just Dance and Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope.

I really enjoy cognitive accessibility, not only because it's an area that I personally need the most, but because it overlaps with so many other areas of accessibility. So much of cognitive accessibility is just good UX, which means we can solve many barriers by design. And that's super cool! Given my background in streaming and public speaking, I'm told that one of my specialties is presenting - although I am a very nervous speaker! I also did a lot of consulting before I joined Ubisoft officially, and I really enjoyed having the opportunity to help teams understand not only the specific barriers that players were facing, but also how those barriers impacted them. Being able to share that empathy and understanding with others is one of the most rewarding things about this job.

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

SJ: Before I joined Ubisoft, I had the opportunity to consult on Just Dance as part of an accessibility workshop. Joining Ubisoft less than six months later and getting to see some of the features that we had discussed actually making it into the game was such a proud moment for me. Being able to see the impact of your work, in one of your favorite games, is really special!

What are your goals for the future of accessibility at Ubisoft?

SJ: I'm excited for our teams to keep pushing forward and doing cool, innovative things with accessibility and the way they approach it. I'm super hopeful that we'll be able to introduce more players to genres they never thought were accessible before.  

Clinton Lexa - Accessibility Design Specialist

How did your relationship with videogames and accessibility begin?

Clinton Lexa: My involvement with accessibility started with my own needs related to controls due to having less coordination and feeling on my right side from cerebral palsy. As I gained exposure through speedrunning and advocacy, I was connected with more of the disabled community and the wide variety of barriers they experience with playing games. Eventually this led to consulting with indie developers on making their games accessible before arriving at Ubisoft.

Tell us about your role on the Accessibility team. What is your specialty/area of expertise?

CL: My work as an accessibility design specialist is technical, and involves keeping the experience of a wide range of players in mind while working with multiple projects on bringing their target experience to as many players as possible. Talking with our developers about their design goals, and how accessibility can weave into those goals, is my favorite part of the job! I understand and speak with teams on many different unintentional barriers that players face across the spectrum of disability, but I'm most familiar with how gameplay interacts with motor and cognitive needs.

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

CL: While I'm proud of the work I did with indies prior to joining Ubisoft, I have learned more about accessibility and game development in general in the one and a half years since joining Ubisoft than ever before, due to excellent mentorship. Projects I am on haven't been released yet, but I am very proud of helping developers see accessibility as an exciting challenge to work on, instead of an afterthought.

What are your goals for the future of accessibility at Ubisoft?

CL: I hope to see accessibility woven into existing processes, so that we can have many unintentional barriers for our players addressed in the base design of our games before resorting to settings. I want thinking about accessibility to become second nature for our designers, for it to be clear that every aspect of our design can affect how accessible our games are, and that accessibility is the responsibility of everyone.

Billy Gregory - Accessibility Program Manager

How did your relationship with videogames and accessibility begin?

Billy Gregory: I have been playing videogames for as long as I can remember. I had been working in web accessibility for several years when Accessibility Consultant Ian Hamilton was invited to speak about game accessibility at a work retreat. It was during this talk that I learned to appreciate the similarities and differences between web and game accessibility. I've learned so much more from the rest of the team since joining!

Tell us about your role on the Accessibility team. What is your specialty/area of expertise?

BG: I am the accessibility program manager for Ubisoft websites. I support all of our client-facing and internal web teams to align our processes, tooling, training, internal guidelines, etc. In my previous role I was director of training at TPGi [an accessibility solutions provider], and being able to bring some of my experience working with various stakeholders and roles has been a big help. I see myself as being the advocate for accessibility across all teams, to make sure we maintain a consistent approach.

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

BG: We're just getting started here at Ubisoft, but I'm definitely proud that I've been able to build on the momentum started by Director of Accessibility David Tisserand before I joined. We're able to support more of our teams and build up some transversal processes that will ensure a consistent user experience across all our web properties. Outside of Ubisoft, I'm proud of the organization I help run, called #a11yTO (Accessibility Toronto). We run one of the largest accessibility meetup groups in the world, and host several large-scale events year-round.

What are your goals for the future of accessibility at Ubisoft?

BG: It's a long-standing joke in the industry that the goal of any accessibility team should be to put themselves out of work. I would love for our teams to have a better understanding of what accessibility is, and how to ensure our products are accessible, with the Accessibility team providing the support and resource materials required to maintain a consistent experience.

Ian Hamilton - Accessibility Consultant

How did your relationship with videogames and accessibility begin?

Ian Hamilton: It began back in 2006, while working on kids' content for the BBC, who have a very strong accessibility culture. It started with understanding the human benefit, seeing the tremendous impact that even small decisions had on people's lives; frustration at the day-to-day mistakes colleagues would make just through lack of awareness; and from there on to the realization how much of an industry-wide problem it was. That took me on a journey from prioritizing it in my work to internal education and support through to advocacy, consulting, and community-building across the industry.

Tell us about your role on the Accessibility team. What is your specialty/area of expertise?

IH: I'm with Ubisoft for a couple of days a week supporting several of the European studios, as well as working on some more strategic initiatives. My background is in larger organizations, and in design and UX, and I cover a range of angles from audits to guidelines, user research, workflow, strategy, test criteria, tool development, hands-on design work - whatever the needs are at the time.

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

IH: The things that give me the most satisfaction are always personal, about individual people. Like watching a developer grow from uncertainty to confidence to advocacy, seeing a workshop participant excited to have their voice heard, a designer scratching their head over the unknown and coming to a simple elegant solution, a gamer player tweeting about the experience that has been enabled for them and the impact it has had. Ultimately that's why we do what we do, because it matters to people, makes a difference to people's lives. Seeing the incremental day by day progress across the whole industry is a wonderful thing too; it's a rare privilege to be able to witness, let alone play a part in, a thing like that.

What are your goals for the future of accessibility at Ubisoft?

IH: Sustainable growth. It's the same across the industry: Companies and individuals have come a long way in a short time, but how do we ensure those standards are maintained, let alone expanded? How can the work of a company of tens of thousands of people be properly supported? How can accessibility be integrated into day-to-day workflows, to become part of business as usual? How can success be measured? How can individuals be empowered? There are answers to questions like these, but wide-scale cultural and organizational change is always a journey. And it's a worthwhile journey, one that will bring games ever closer to reaching their true potential. 

Aderyn Thompson - Lead Accessibility Design

How did your relationship with videogames and accessibility begin?

Aderyn Thompson: I've gamed for as long as I have memories, and really it began as a child, but in earnest it started as my disabilities and chronic pain became unignorable about 13 or 14 years ago. In 2013, I had a stroke, which meant I couldn't play games for nearly a year, and that's what lit a fire under me to do something about it!

Tell us about your role on the Accessibility team. What is your specialty/area of expertise?

AT: I'm the design lead for the games arm of the team, which means shaping and guiding the work we do from a game design perspective. Leveraging the experience I gained in my previous 15-year career, plus seven years in games and 12 as an accessibility advocate, I've begun researching, planning, and developing the resources we need globally for all of our games teams. As our team grows, I've been lucky to be able to collaborate with our specialists to grow these projects. After helping David hire and grow our team, I now mentor our specialists and look after two of our flagship titles. In my first year at Ubisoft, I looked after 10 of our games.

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

AT: I've been so fortunate to be able to contribute to so many things happening at Ubisoft that it's difficult to pick one or two things to be proud of, especially because in this discipline, we always feel so far away from our vision.

One thing in particular, though, would be spearheading the shift we're in the middle of right now, which is teaching everyone to move past thinking of accessibility as extra, dedicated features, often called "options" or "settings." This means learning to understand that accessibility isn't one tangible thing, but simply the state of access for our players. Every design intention we set impacts the accessibility of our games, and it's important to move on from addressing everything as settings - this could create a siloed experience for disabled players.

I think, thanks to being autistic, I see a lot of things from a distance - a web of systems and knowledge. There's nothing I could be prouder of than to see that knowledge and understanding spread and grow, while enabling people to work as collaboratively as possible.

What are your goals for the future of accessibility at Ubisoft?

AT: In the near term, we're working on shaping a robust knowledge-management network to make sure our documentation and other resources are as discoverable, usable, and maintainable as possible. In game development, it's so important to have everyone sharing knowledge.

Everything rests on sharing things like design documentation, best practices, benchmarks, and trainings. It's all about skills-building - my goals are to have as many developers as possible be experts in accessibility, because we can't grow specialists fast enough!

In the far future, I really hope that as an industry, not just Ubisoft, accessibility becomes more about equitable access for all players, moving beyond getting people over the threshold.

David Tisserand - Director of Accessibility

How did your relationship with videogames and accessibility begin?

David Tisserand: It began when I met Ian Hamilton while being a games user researcher at PlayStation. At the time, I wasn't in a position to drive the necessary change he was suggesting, but it stuck with me. It took me roughly eight years to be able to apply what Ian had tried to convey to me, but once I did manage to apply even a little bit of what he recommended on Assassin's Creed Origins, there was no turning back. It became a real passion to create the change needed in our company, and the industry as a whole, for the benefit of all players.

Tell us about your role on the Accessibility team. What is your specialty/area of expertise?

DT: I'm the founder and manager of the Accessibility team. I'm responsible for Ubisoft's accessibility strategy and the management of the team's members, which consist mostly of ensuring they've got all the support they need to be at their best in their respective roles. By doing so, I can better learn from them and keep building an even more efficient strategy to ensure our games and services teams are increasingly more accessible over time.

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

DT: Creating the Ubisoft Accessibility team is the accomplishment I'm the proudest of in my all career. And of course, I'll always remember the two years I spent on Assassin's Creed Origins, helping the dev team with putting users at the center of the design process while kickstarting the company's accessibility revolution with the help of the Corporate Social Responsibility and Quality Control teams. The Accessibility team may not have existed without those past experiences, which have helped me grow and better understand games development and the power of transversal collaboration inside a company.

What are your goals for the future of access at Ubisoft?

DT: The endgame is to put the Accessibility team out of work. I truly hope that through our work we can help everyone at Ubisoft to think about accessibility as part of their day-to-day responsibility, to have policies and processes in place that ensure that accessibility is considered whenever a decision is taken, and that every employee knows the best practices and the thinking-approach required to deliver best-in-class accessible experiences. As this won't happen overnight, in the meantime, I hope to be able to expand our team's mandate for workplace accessibility in the near future.

For more on accessibility, check out the Future of Accessibility at Ubisoft or our Accessibility Spotlights for Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope and Rocksmith+.