Xbox Accessibility Guideline 112: UI navigation

Goal

The goal of this Xbox Accessibility Guideline (XAG) is to provide players with clear and consistent UI navigation experiences throughout the entirety of a game. This can help players who are neurodiverse, have learning disabilities, are new to gaming, or are navigating the experience with various types of assistive technologies.

Overview

The UI of a game should be consistent and intuitive. If a player is unable to navigate through menu UIs to configure game settings or select appropriate game modes because of confusion or inconsistent UI components, they can be excluded from the game from the very beginning. Similarly, players who use various types of assistive technologies like screen readers can be easily disoriented if the UI has inconsistencies throughout different points in the navigation experience. Assistive technology inputs like voice commands, eye gaze, or digital inputs can also be difficult to use if interaction mechanics throughout the UI are inconsistent. It's important to ensure that the layout and interaction mechanisms of all UIs across the game use similar orders and structures. This enables players to more easily find what they're looking for and configure game options to meet their needs.

Additionally, players who use assistive technologies like screen narration or non-traditional inputs (for example, keyboard-only or digital, mouth-operated joysticks) can be hampered or blocked from gameplay if focus doesn't move in a clear, consistent way. The movement of focus should always be predictable.

Scoping questions

It's important to ensure that the navigation experience is consistent across all UI experiences when applicable.

• Does your game contain multiple UI screens or pages (for example, if the game has many different navigable pages such as multiple settings pages, character personalization pages, or “market” pages where players can buy items)?

• Are UI elements consistently located across each screen when applicable (for example, the “title” of each settings page is always at the top of the page and read first in the screen narration reading order)?

• Are interaction methods consistent across the UI for elements that appear in multiple locations (like “Press A to select”)?

Implementation guidelines

• From the game’s initial launch, ensure that all pathways to the accessibility features/settings menu UI are fully accessible.
  This can be done by:

  • Prompting players to configure accessibility settings as the first screen that appears when the game launches. After the player has defined them, any subsequent experiences only need to reflect the accessibility settings that the player made.

  • Meeting all XAGs by default when the game initially launches (for example, text display and contrast ratios meet minimum guidelines, narration and subtitles/captions are enabled by default, and visual distractions are disabled by default).

  • Meeting all XAGs by default when the game initially launches but using platform settings to disable certain items by default, based on the player’s current platform settings (if possible).

    • For example, a player has “Let Games Read to Me” disabled at the Xbox platform level. As a result, the game doesn’t need to launch with in-game narration enabled by default.
    • If the game is unable to read platform settings, narration should be enabled by default for all players.

• The UI navigation order is logical and consistent across the full game.

• The UI is fully navigable by keyboard and controller digital input alone.

• All aspects of the game, including menu UI's and gameplay, are fully navigable by multiple inputs (mouse, eye gaze, voice, keyboard, and controller).

  • Some inputs might not be supported by the platform (for example, eye gaze on Xbox). If platforms support multiple input options, games should ensure that their UIs are also navigable by multiple supported inputs.

• Components that are repeated across multiple pages or screens should appear in the same relative order (the same place in the programmatic sequence) each time that they're repeated.

• If an interface can be navigated sequentially, focusable components should receive focus in an order that's logical and preserves meaning and purpose.

• Support a focus order that's aligned with the meaning or operation of the UI. If the navigation sequence is independent of the meaning or operation, align the focus order with the flow of the visual design.

• After navigating to the last item in the UI/menu structure, the player should be taken back to the first item in the UI/menu structure and vice versa.

  Note

  This guideline only applies to linear menu structures where focus can be moved EITHER up or down, OR left or right. Menus structures that allow focus to be moved to elements in any direction (such as a menu with focusable items arranged in a 4x4 tile) do not need to loop.

  We encourage developers to have an option to enable and disable menu looping for all menus.

• There should be more than one way to locate content that's part of a complex set of information that spans multiple pages/screens, such as bestiaries, quest logs, or large inventories.

• If the visual layout of a screen changes (because of UI scaling or resolution change), the order in which elements are navigated should update to maintain consistency with the visual layout.

• Text/UI scaling shouldn't result in having to scroll in two directions to reveal all content.

• When game map UI is scaled or zoomed in on, provide an alternative way to navigate the map that does not require scrolling such as a supplementary text list of points of interest.

• Provide persistent links back to the main menu screen or the initial interactive screen on all submenus.

• If focus can be moved to a UI element of an interface, focus can be moved away from that element by using the same input (keyboard or mouse) method.

  • If doing so requires any means of navigation that's inconsistent with how the rest of the interface is navigated, the UI should provide clear interaction prompts to indicate how focus can be moved away.

Potential player impact

The guidelines in this XAG can help reduce barriers for the following players.

Resources and tools