7 Practical Tips for Making Your Seppo Games More Accessible
7 Practical Tips for Making Your Seppo Games More Accessible
Accessibility doesn’t mean boring. In fact, the most engaging Seppo games are often the most accessible ones: clear, consistent, and designed with all learners in mind.
Whether you’re creating onboarding adventures, compliance missions, or classroom quests, accessible game design ensures that everyone can play. You don’t need deep technical skills or accessibility expertise to make a difference. Small design choices can remove barriers, improve focus, and make learning more inclusive for everyone.
This article is part of Seppo’s 5-part accessibility series, created together with our developer and accessibility expert Helvi Lainekallio. In this second installment, we focus on practical tips for accessible game design—the kind you can apply immediately in your Seppo games.
📚 This article is part of our 5-part accessibility series.
Already published:
Coming up next:
- Cognitive Accessibility – how to reduce cognitive load and make learning clearer and calmer
- Accessible by Design – how Seppo builds accessibility into the product, not on top of it
- The Human Side of Accessible Learning – why accessibility is ultimately about confidence, connection, and belonging
What Does Accessible Game Design Mean?
Accessible game design means designing learning games that:
- are easy to navigate and control
- work with different devices and assistive tools
- don’t rely on speed, precision, or a single way of interacting
- communicate clearly what the learner should do next
In game-based learning, accessibility is tested instantly. If a player can’t navigate the game, understand how to interact, or keep up with the mechanics, learning never really starts.
“Many accessibility barriers in games aren’t intentional. They come from habits like adding timers, hiding instructions, or assuming everyone interacts in the same way,” Lainekallio explains.
The good news is that these barriers are often easy to remove. Here are 7 tips to make your Seppo games more accessible.
- Start with clarity
- Make navigations effortless
- Design for focus
- Use meaningful feedback
- Support different ways of learning and responding
- Test like a player
- Keep accessibility in mind from the start
Read more about each tip below
1. Start with Clarity
Clear instructions are the foundation of accessible game design.
Good practices
- Use plain language: short sentences and familiar words
- Break long instructions into bullet points or short paragraphs
- Avoid unnecessary metaphors, abbreviations, or insider terms
Example:
Instead of “Embark on your mission to explore the map,” say: “Open the map and find the first task.”
“Clear wording helps everyone, especially multilingual learners, screen reader users, and players learning in distracting environments,” Lainekallio says.
2. Make Navigations Effortless
If players struggle to find tasks or return to where they left off, accessibility suffers.
By default, all Seppo tasks are open for players to complete in any order. To make progression clearer and help players see what to do next, you can use branching game mode—this way, players only see the tasks they are currently able to interact with.
Design tips:
- Use the Task List view as your accessibility backbone when creating games in Seppo so players clearly see available tasks and what to do next
- Keep structure consistent across tasks and sections so progression is easy to follow
- Use classic board-game-style pathing in the game board design to visually guide players through what’s next and how many tasks remain
- Avoid hiding key actions behind unnecessary clicks (by design included in Seppo)
Bonus tip:
Add orientation cues in descriptions, such as “This is Task 3 of 8”, to help players stay informed and motivated.
3. Design for Focus
Accessible games respect different pacing and attention needs.
Reduce friction by
- Avoiding timers unless they’re essential to learning
- Limiting moving visuals, animations, or background distractions (in Seppo, you can enable “No animations” mode)
- Using contrast-friendly colors
Pro move:
Test your game in both bright and dim environments to ensure all visuals, like images, videos, and task pins, are easy to see. Contrast and readability can change dramatically depending on device brightness and surroundings.
In Seppo, accessibility-aware design already takes this into account. However, when using custom white-label branding, it’s especially important to test everything in real conditions.
For example, if task pins are too close in colour to the game board, they can be difficult to spot, especially on mobile devices or in low-light environments.
4. Use Meaningful Feedback
Feedback is part of accessibility. Players need to understand what happened, and what to do next.
In Seppo, feedback can be provided in two ways:
- Automatic evaluation, with predefined feedback shown when a player completes a task
- Manual evaluation, where instructors review responses and give more detailed, personalized feedback
Both approaches support accessibility when feedback is clear, constructive, and forward-looking. Read more about how to give feedback in Seppo.
For feedback, instead of “Wrong answer”, try something like: “Not quite. Look for keywords in the question and try again.”
Good feedback:
- Explains why something didn’t work
- Encourages retrying without penalty
- Clearly signals success and progress
“Always tell players what comes next. Uncertainty is one of the fastest ways to break engagement, and one of the easiest barriers to remove,” Lainekallio states.
Bonus tip:
Do not add multiple tasks to one task pin to enable feedback being visible immediately.
5. Support Different Ways of Learning and Responding
Accessible games don’t force everyone into the same interaction style.
Design for flexibility:
- Allow responses via text, image, video, or audio answers (available in creative tasks)
- Add alt text to images so screen readers can describe them
- Include short descriptions for videos
- Provide example answers when possible
Example question: Describe how teamwork helped you solve the problem.
Example answer (text): We divided the task into smaller parts and agreed on who would handle each step. When one of us got stuck, another team member explained their approach, which helped us move forward. Sharing ideas made the solution clearer and faster.
This shows learners:
- how long the answer should be
- what level of detail is expected
- that clear, simple language is enough
Tip
“It’s a good idea to present learning material in multiple formats. While text instructions are easy to create, using images, videos, and audio helps cater to a wider audience and keeps the game enjoyable for everyone,” says Santeri Jaakkola, Seppo’s Head of Production.
“For smooth remote team play, always include guidance on how to share audio when screen sharing,” he adds.
6. Test Like a Player
One of the simplest accessibility checks is also the most effective: test your game as a player.
Try this:
- Play your game using only the keyboard
- Move through the game slowly and intentionally
- Ask yourself: Is it always clear what to do next?
“You can also ask a colleague or a friend to test the game as a player to get additional perspectives. If possible, test with real users who have different accessibility needs—for example, users who rely on screen readers or subtitles,” Lainekallio adds.
7. Keep Accessibility in Mind from the Start
Accessibility works best when it’s part of your design plan, and not just something added later.
When designing a game, think:
- clarity over cleverness
- predictable structure over surprises
- feedback, pacing, and choice
“Seppo provides the platform, but instructors and creators bring accessibility to life through their design choices,” Lainekallio says.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of the series, where we’ll focus on cognitive accessibility and reducing cognitive load for players.
Ready to create learning that includes everyone? Book a demo or reach out to our support team (support@seppo.io). We’re happy to help you plan and build accessible learning experiences.
Sources:
Deng, Y. (2023). Inclusive Games: Accessible Game Design for the Visually Impaired.
Emerald Insight. (2018) Gamification and accessibility
Konnektis (eLearning blog)(2023). Designing Accessible Gamified Learning: Inclusive Games for All.
GeneralistProgrammer. (2025). Game Accessibility Guide: Design Inclusive Games for All Players.
Game Accessibility Guidelines (2025)