Damien Robson

Forewarning: this is the longest article I've ever written, so you might want to strap yourselves in. And no, the irony is not lost on me that an article about walls of text and how they're bad is in itself a wall of text.

Today's corporate world is obsessed with productivity, profit and "deep work". Workspaces are often overwhelming - persistent pings and rings of Teams and Slack, those noisy co-workers who don't realise how loud they actually are, and the "information fatigue" of spreadsheets and databases.

By leveraging the concepts that many of us would associate with video games, we can apply "Gaming Clarity" to day-to-day working to both build compliance and improve performance.

What we mean by cognitive impairment

Cognitive impairment is probably the most difficult to explain and understand from an accessibility point of view and yet, we all know and understand what both words mean.

Cognitive: relating to the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.

Impairment: the state or quality of having a physical or mental condition that limits a specified faculty or function.

Put them together and you get something along the lines of: the state or quality of having a physical or mental condition that limits the acquisition of knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses. In plain English: it's about how hard your brain has to work to process the information in front of you.

Nice and clear.

But what does this have to do with digital accessibility?

Setting the scene

Picture the scene: day one, new job. You walk in, sit at a desk, and wait. The computer in front of you hums and crackles as its fans tick over and the LAN cable does its thing.

The monitor's display flicks on, and you're presented with the most confusing and complex bit of software you've ever seen. Bars grow and shrink, icons flash, beeps and pings resonate from seemingly every corner of the application.

Some people see that as a challenge. A foe to overcome. For others, however, it will be one of the most unsettling, overwhelming experiences possible.

The lay of the land in the real world

When building websites and apps, cognitive impairment often falls down the list of things that needs to be considered, falling way behind the likes of visual impairment, hearing impairment and even motor impairment. We make sure colour contrast ratios are up to spec. We ensure that focus indicators are clear and obvious. We make sure audio doesn't play automatically and we make sure that videos have transcriptions and closed-captions.

Fewer considerations are given towards cognition. UIs are misleading, overwhelming and constantly battling for your attention. Couple that with the usual noises of an office (either at home or in an actual building) - people, washing machines, TVs, radios - and any noises made by the app(s) you're running, and the experience can quickly become overwhelming.

So what can we do?

Accessibility and Video Games

I've been a gamer all of my life. It started at a very young age (3 or 4 years old) when my father bought a NES and stuck a controller in my hand. And that was me.

Games are a lot like any other bit of software. Designers and developers trying to cram as much information into an experience as possible - after all, they've usually got to justify the £50+ price tags (if you're lucky!), and it's a part of the reason that the industry was worth almost £9 billion in 2025.

For a long time, games were only as accessible as the developers made them. At the dawn of video games, they came as-is; no patches, no updates, no DLC. What you bought was what you got, warts and all. So if the developer decided they really liked a red palette, and you suffered from red-blind colourblindness, well then you're going to be staring at lot of yellows and more yellows. If the game went on to say that all enemies on screen were red and all friendlies were green, well then you might as well just put the game back in its box and put it in the cupboard.

Nowadays, games come with whole hosts of options to allow players from all walks of life to have the same experiences. It's not perfect, but it's getting better. From simple tweaks like swapping colour palettes to almost entire rewrites of the game so that it can be played as an interactive story, more and more games let users play the way that works best for them. Control has moved from the developers to the players.

Knowing this, we can return to the question, "what can we do?". Well, we can start with a look at a few examples of scenarios from video games over the years and highlight where conscious change has led to improvements in accessibility (and particularly cognitive accessibility).

The "Wall of Text"

The Problem

Way back when, games had to be kept as small as possible. Storage was expensive, and small, so it wasn't common for players to be dropped into a game without so much as a suggestion as to what to do or where to go. The Legend of Zelda does this brilliantly. There are only a couple of screens to navigate, and both are extremely simple. There's the title screen. It has maybe 10 words, and one instruction: "push start button". Then there's the file select screen. Again, 8 words. A little more in terms of interaction but nothing complex. And then, the game loads, and you're off. No story, no introduction, just a push out of the door.

Fast forward to games such as Disco Elysium. You're going to spend the first chunk of playtime reading, assuming you have the cognition to do so. The amount of content and context requiring your focus and attention can be draining to those with dyslexia or ADHD who just want to play the game.

The Solution

More recent games have moved away from walls of text. The excellent Portal gives you a bit of instruction via spoken word, and then waits for the player to act. At certain points, more asynchronous audio plays. Lather, rinse, repeat. Players are given plenty of time to think about what they're being asked to do. The game encourages you to follow simple instructions throughout, but at no point does it stop you playing in order to read.

By reducing the amount of written content that players have to parse, a game becomes accessible to a wider audience. Players with cognitive impairments, or neurodivergent users with ADHD and dyslexia can get into the action almost immediately. Users with poor working memory only have to retain one or two things at most at a given time. Users with dyslexia hear the information they need.

Sometimes, less is more. We can apply this on a wider basis digitally by keeping content short and focused. If information cannot be shortened, break it up into smaller, more processable chunks. Consider things like typeface, line spacing and font size to improve readability, or provide alternative media formats that users can consume if they don't have the cognitive capacity to read.

The Overwhelming User Interface

The Problem

Modern user interfaces (UIs) are busy. They're designed and built to provide users with as much information and value as possible, all at once. This can be distracting and quite overwhelming to users who are subject to cognitive impairment, or identify as neurodivergent. And it's not just built-in features that users have to fight against. It's not uncommon these days for software to ship with advertisements, particularly in apps which are "free". Ads are built to distract and grab your attention, placing it not on what you should be doing, but what people and companies want you to be doing.

Side note: I've put "free" in double quotes because free apps aren't free in the actual sense, you just pay for them with something other than money: your data. But that's not what we're discussing here.

Take a look through the App or Play Store on your phone. Most free apps and games are listed as including advertisements. Shockingly, they're also finding their way into paid-for games. Log into Minecraft, Fortnite or a sports game of your choosing and see how long it takes for some extra content or another game from the same publisher to be thrust in front of you. Companies want your attention. They grab it by making things flash, pulsate and generally cause a big song-and-dance. For people with no cognitive impairments or neurodivergences, they're annoying. For those who do fall into the cognitive and neurological "flavours", such content can be infuriating, overwhelming and anything and everything in between.

The Solution

Despite this, there is software out there that pivots the other way, scaling back the UI and keeping things crisp and clean. Way back when, PONG had five things on screen at any given time: 2 paddles, a ball and two score counters (if you were particularly fancy, your version also had a dividing line down the middle! Get you, fancy-pants!). Over time, game interfaces became a sea of menus, lights, sounds and activity. Ever tried to play a series like Crusader Kings? Ever return to World of Warcraft after a break of indeterminate length? You get my point.

I'm glad to say that the industry is starting to roll this kind of thinking back to basics. Games, and particularly indie titles with smaller budgets like Celeste and Mini Metro/Mini Motorways, pride themselves on minimalism and only showing you what you need to know. It's not uncommon to also experience dynamic UIs in gaming; God of War and Horizon have almost no UI, and only when you need to know something are parts of it shown. This maps perfectly to software - why show 50 buttons and menus when the user only needs three for their current task? You're automatically reducing cognitive load and removing that potential sense of overwhelm, whilst enabling people to get things that they need to get done, done.

The Power of Writing

The Problem

Information is often presented through audio-based means, whether in the real world or in a video game. Train announcements blare out over the tannoy for the whole station to hear - unless you're d/Deaf, at which point you'd better be near an information board or you're very likely to know that your train has arrived, or has been delayed. But the situation goes one step further. Stations are busy places. Trains coming and going, guard whistles, announcements, chatter. Even as someone with no hearing impairments, it can be difficult to hear what you need to hear and, if your attention drifts for a second, you've lost the context entirely.

Gaming does the same thing - instructions and world-building story is presented to players predominantly through audio, and if your focus is not entirely on the matter at hand, you're going to have little to no idea of what's going on, almost like watching a film but starting at the middle.

The Solution

As I mentioned earlier, there's a power to succinct writing. But for audio-impaired users, we need the full picture; they want and deserve the same level of information as those users without any impairments. So we provide transcripts, captions and even interpretation. All good.

This has added benefits for users with cognitive impairment. If the text matches the audio, there's less to concentrate on. Better still, some games, such as The Witcher and Mass Effect, don't carry on the conversation without user interaction. The game (quite literally) pauses the conversation and gives users the time they need to read and process what's been said and what's been asked of them. Games have also started providing transcripts of conversations and interactions which are stored in easy-to-access, navigable locations for revisiting and reviewing at a later date. This reduces cognitive load tremendously. Users who struggle with memory can easily remind themselves of what they're doing. Users with low attention spans aren't penalised because something moved or made a noise in the room.

You also have access to formatting options which enhance the process of committing things to memory. Of all these options, never underestimate the power of a list. We use lists daily to track things and remind us of what we need to do. The thing about lists is, I don't think I've ever seen anyone write a list that used more than a single sentence (some lists take it further and reduce that to a few words, but that can actually worsen the situation because it places expectation on the user to remember and interpret, increasing cognitive load). Presenting information in smaller, manageable chunks that can be revisited at a later date, as many times as required, provides a far more accessible way of understanding what's expected of users that a "fire-and-forget" approach.

Slowing Things Down

The Problem

The Solution

Thankfully, the gaming industry realised that penalising players for not having superhuman reflexes isn't actually "fun."

Modern titles now offer an array of tempo-controlling toggles. Games like Spider-Man or Star Wars Jedi: Survivor allow you to completely turn off QTE button-mashing, or slow down the game's combat speed by 30%, 50%, or more during intense moments. Similarly, the rise of "Story Mode" difficulty settings allows players to engage with a game's narrative without worrying about immediate mechanical failure. It hands the tempo control directly to the user.

We desperately need this "Difficulty Slider" mindset in digital design. If a user needs to fill out a complex form, why are we timing them out after 15 minutes? Unless there is a strict, unbypassable security or real-time inventory reason (like booking concert tickets), we should give users the power to pause, save progress, or completely remove session limits.

By removing the pressure of time, we don't just make systems compliant; we create an environment where people can actually think clearly.

Summing up

Designing for cognitive accessibility isn't about "dumbing down" software or stripping away features. It's about recognising that human attention, memory, and processing speeds fluctuate - not just because of permanent neurodivergence or disability, but because of life. We are all trying to work through a barrage of Slack notifications, screaming kids, background noise, and overwhelming data.

Video games have spent decades learning how to guide a human brain through complex, data-heavy environments without causing a total meltdown. It's time corporate software took a leaf out of their playbook.

By scaling back chaotic UIs, letting text do the heavy lifting, and giving users the ultimate power to "pause" and set their own tempo, we can build a digital world that works with the human brain, rather than constantly battling against it.

Game on.