What Gaming Teaches Us About Web Accessibility and Inclusion

Web accessibility runs on WCAG, and WCAG is essential. But it is thin in places, especially around cognitive load and personalization. Meanwhile, an entire industry has been solving harder versions of these problems for a decade, because a game that frustrates you is a game you stop playing.

Video games had to make accessibility feel good, not just compliant. Nobody finishes a game out of obligation. That pressure produced ideas the web should have stolen years ago. Here are four we are bringing back.

The Last of Us Part II shipped with around sixty accessibility settings. Nobody wants to configure sixty settings. So Naughty Dog also shipped one-tap presets for vision, hearing, and motor needs, and learned from playtesting that players wanted the presets and the fine-tuning, not one or the other. Presets cut the activation energy; drill-down preserves control.

The web has no concept of bundled preference profiles. Every site makes you start from zero. Dashboards and web apps should offer display profiles (low-vision, low-motion, focus) that set font size, contrast, density, and animation in one tap, with every individual toggle still available underneath.

Xbox's accessibility standards require that critical audio cues also be expressed visually or through vibration. Nothing essential travels by one channel alone.

On the web, we still ship status as color alone (a red dot, a green dot) and call it done. The gaming rule is better: every status is color plus icon plus text. A form error is a red border plus an icon plus a text explanation plus an announcement for screen readers. Redundancy is not decoration; it is robustness.

Game designers learned that colorblindness filters do not fix hue-only encoding. The fix is shape-first design: distinct silhouettes with color layered on top, so the meaning survives grayscale and every type of color vision deficiency. Status pills get an icon and a text label, not just a colored dot.

This one is personal for us. Someone on our team is color-deficient. If your interface needs someone to distinguish two shades to understand it, it is broken for millions of people. Design the shape first, then add color.

The game accessibility guidelines devote enormous attention to cognitive load: reminders of your current objective, contextual tips, progress summaries, the ability to hide background movement. Memory, attention, and processing differences are the largest underserved group in accessibility, and WCAG's coverage of them is thin.

Translate it directly: multi-step workflows should always show where you are and what is next. Let people resume where they left off instead of timing their session out. A focus mode that hides secondary panels is not a feature. It is an accessibility accommodation.

None of this requires new technology. Presets, redundant channels, shape-first color, cognitive wayfinding: these are design decisions, and most of them are cheap. The expensive part is knowing they exist.

That is also how we work at Thanos Labs: our Web Accessibility AI agent audits against WCAG 2.2 AA, and we feed it the patterns industries ahead of the web already proved, because compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. A human in the loop approves every fix before it ships.

• Audit against WCAG 2.2 AA first: it is the legal and practical baseline.
• Then apply the gaming patterns: presets, redundant channels, shape-first color.
• Test with real assistive-technology users, not just automated checkers.