Happy GAAD (Global Accessibility Awareness Day) 2024 everyone!

While SWTOR isn’t perfect, it has made huge improvements over the years for accessibility additions. “Star Wars is for everyone” including in gaming!

Last year I created a portal to help point SWTOR players in the right direction when it comes to exploring accessibility options, tips, advice from others, and ideas about how to approach the nuances of gaming socially with disabilities.

This has been an awesome project! I started with exploring how to play a computer game with controllers – especially SWTOR which has 30-40 buttons per class! A one-handed player reached out to me with tons of tips and now so many people use them!

I’d see that people “could” play with a controller, but so many people say “but the game has too many buttons…” I loved being able to challenge this stereotype through research, testing, and advice from SWTOR players. You can keybind 52 buttons on a standard controller easily!

I’ve noticed this misinformation has been spread a lot less since I created these comprehensive guides which is AWESOME! It makes me so happy to see long-term differences from such a big project. Game on, PC gamers, don’t let hand accessibility options stop you!

I’d heard from friends that another way to game with hand or general pain disabilities is an MMO mouse as you can use one hand / limited hand mobility. So I started exploring, and found SO many options!

While SWTOR has always had captions from the launch of the game, there’s a lot of nuance and tricks that can be lost when gaming when Deaf or Hard of Hearing. And social stuff can be tricky! So I asked around and made a guide.

My fave game SWTOR is unfortunately a fail for playing with Total Blindness, many players play Legally Blind or with Low Vision. There is a tonnnn of stuff you can adjust in-game but not all of it is obvious so I made a huge guide!

Color-blindness in SWTOR is not a huge problem compared to some other games, but the devs introduced some great settings long after the game’s launch which is super cool!

Many SWTOR players struggle when it comes to grouping up or talking to other players due to anxiety. So 50+ players contributed tips for this huuugee guide on gaming with Social or General anxiety!

I was curious to see how SWTOR evolved over the years, so I went and tracked down every accessibility change they’d made over the years. Good job SWTOR! I also tracked which were still missing on the portal homepage.

My part in create accessibility-focused guides for SWTOR is now as complete as I’m going to get it, but every day I keep in mind that everyone plays and learns differently and try to include different options and tips in the game-content guides I write. 💞

Big cheers to every person who publicly talks about accessibility like @stevesaylor, @stevenspohn, @AbleGamers, @talk2MeGooseman, devs who add it to their games and every player who publicly shares the unique things they face and the tips they’ve learned! I learn so much.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities.

Cheers everyone and happy SWTOR-ing out there! accessibility.day