Accessible dialogues and sound in Coffee Noir

Recently, the topic of game accessibility is popular in Poland. Accessibility means adjusting games and game settings to the needs of people with disabilities.

We support that idea and we had a pleasure of sponsoring PGG Jam: All Play vol.4 last weekend! It’s a game jam dedicated to educating game developers about different disabilities and barriers that might stop some players from fully experiencing their games.

At the PGG Jam one of our team members – Karolina Stachowiak, the Social Media Specialist, gave a lecture about audio accessibility. Proper audio settings and subtitles, to be precise. She has a hearing disability, but wears cochlear implants that let her hear.

Coffee Noir will have text indicating sighing, coughing or other such sounds that appear in dialogues so that detectives with auditory disabilities do not lose anything from the conversations. That reduces barriers for fully able people as well – for example parents who play with very silent sound or no sound so that they can pay attention to what their little kids are doing. Accessibility actually supports a wide range of players.

Also, the dialogues continue only after you click a new option and the text in our cutscene comics also continues only after you click anywhere. This allows you to read it at your own pace.

What is more, we have accessible sound settings. There are separate volume sliders for music, SFX and voice. This way, every player can adjust the in-game sound to their needs and preferences. The screen below is a work in progress.

We hope that our dialogue text, as well as sound  will be helpful to those who will play Coffee Noir. Currently, we are making sure that the audio description of the sounds mentioned above is in all dialogues we have finished so far!