Accessibility for Small HTML5 Games: What Helps Most for the Least Work

Accessibility in games is often treated as a large, expensive project for big studios. For a small browser game, most of the value comes from a handful of choices you can make in a day: not relying only on color, letting players use the controls they can, giving them time, and making text readable. This post lists practical accessibility features for HTML5 games, ordered roughly by how much they help compared to how much work they take.

Browser games reach a very wide audience: children, older players, people on old phones, people playing with one hand on a bus. Many of the same changes that help disabled players also help everyone in a difficult situation. Readable text helps on small screens. Not relying on sound helps when the phone is muted. Pause helps when someone gets interrupted.

A useful public reference is the Game Accessibility Guidelines project, which groups recommendations into basic, intermediate and advanced. The suggestions below are mostly from the basic level.

Color vision deficiency is common, especially red-green, which affects a notable share of men. If your game's only difference between a good and bad item is red versus green, some players cannot play it.

• Add a second signal: shape, symbol, pattern or position. A sorting game can put a small symbol on each color. Enemies can differ in shape, not only color.
• Check your palette with a color blindness simulator. Chrome DevTools can emulate several vision deficiencies under the Rendering panel.
• Avoid red and green as the main pair when another pair works just as well, such as blue and orange.

• A minimum size that stays readable on a phone. Text that looks fine on your monitor may be tiny on a 5-inch screen.
• High contrast between text and background. Put text on a solid or semi-transparent panel, not directly on busy art.
• Simple, clear fonts for instructions. Save decorative fonts for titles.
• Short sentences. This also helps players reading in a second language.

• Accept several inputs for every action: keyboard, mouse and touch, and a gamepad if you can.
• Avoid requiring holds and rapid tapping when the game does not need them. If it does, consider a toggle option (tap to start, tap to stop) instead of holding.
• Let players remap keys if your game uses more than a few. An action-based input layer makes this easy.
• Make touch targets big, around 44 to 48 CSS pixels at least, with space between them.
• Support one-handed play where the design allows. Many one-tap games already do.

• Pause at any time, and pause automatically when the tab is hidden.
• No unskippable timers on menus or tutorials.
• Where timing is not the point of the game, consider a relaxed mode with slower speed or no timer.
• Let players replay tutorials or open a how-to-play screen.

Many players have sound off: deaf and hard-of-hearing players, but also everyone playing on a phone in public. If an important event is only signaled by sound, such as an enemy approaching from off-screen, add a visual cue too: an arrow at the edge of the screen, a flash, a vibration. If your game has spoken dialogue, add subtitles.

• Avoid large areas of rapid flashing. Flashing content can trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy. The W3C's WCAG guidelines describe "no more than three flashes in any one second" as a threshold for web content, and the same caution makes sense in games.
• Offer a reduced motion setting: less screen shake, fewer flashing effects, no camera bobbing. Turn it on by default when the browser reports prefers-reduced-motion: reduce.
• Avoid sudden, extreme camera movements in 3D games. They can cause motion sickness.

Not everyone can react at the same speed. Simple options help a wide range of players: an easy mode, more lives, slower speed, or an option to skip a level after several failures. They do not have to change your main design. Players who want the challenge leave them off.

• Show what the goal is at all times, such as a target score or an objective line.
• Show clearly what killed the player or why a move failed.
• Use consistent symbols and colors throughout the game.

If your menus are HTML, use real <button> elements with visible focus outlines. They work with keyboard, screen readers and switches without extra work. If menus are drawn on a canvas, add arrow key and Enter navigation with a clear highlight. Fully supporting screen readers in a canvas game is hard, but keyboard-navigable menus are easy.

Accessibility settings are useless if the player has to set them every time. Save them with the rest of the settings and apply them before the first frame.

• Play with the sound off. Do you miss anything important?
• Play with a color blindness simulation on.
• Play only with the keyboard, then only with one hand on a phone.
• Play with CPU throttling, as if on an old phone, and check if timing still feels fair.
• Ask someone who is not a regular gamer to try it.

• Color is never the only signal.
• Text is readable on a phone, with good contrast.
• Multiple inputs, big touch targets, toggles instead of required holds where possible.
• Pause anytime, auto-pause, no forced timers in menus.
• Visual cues for important sounds.
• No rapid large flashing, a reduced motion option.
• Difficulty options where it fits.
• Keyboard-navigable menus, saved settings.

• Game Accessibility Guidelines.
• W3C, Understanding WCAG 2.1: Three Flashes or Below Threshold.

More practical guides are on the PlayKovo developer blog.