Key Highlights
- Jonathan Bedard and his team were nominated for Best Accessibility at the 2025 Game Awards but lost to Doom: The Dark Ages.
- The focus on accessibility has been a priority for Assassin’s Creed games for nearly a decade, with several innovations baked into the development process.
- Bedard believes that creating worlds and games where everyone feels welcome is crucial for Ubisoft’s mission statement.
- Accessibility features in Assassin’s Creed Shadows include combo string mapping, more descriptive subtitles, and screen readers to support visually impaired players.
The Importance of Accessibility in Gaming
Gaming has long been a world where innovation is key. However, it’s the commitment to making that innovation accessible to all players that truly sets apart developers like Ubisoft. In an interview with Polygon, Jonathan Bedard, director of user experience for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, discusses the importance of accessibility in game development and how it has become a cornerstone of the series.
From Nomination to Victory: A Different Perspective on Loss
Losing an award you’ve been nominated for can be a quietly soul-crushing moment. Even as you politely clap for the winner, it’s only human to feel a little disappointed. That’s not how Jonathan Bedard sees it.
He and his team were up for Best Accessibility at the 2025 Game Awards, an honor that ultimately went to Doom: The Dark Ages. For him, it wasn’t a loss at all.
“It’s one of those disciplines where we don’t mind if somebody beats us,” Bedard told Polygon. “When someone wins, we all win.”
Achieving Inclusivity Through Innovation
Ubisoft’s commitment to accessibility has been a priority for nearly a decade now. The series’ transitional moment came in 2017 with Assassin’s Creed Origins, which featured several innovations, including ambient subtitles and eye-tracking control support. But the dedication to making their games accessible goes back even further.
Bedard joined the company in 2010 and has been working alongside a larger team to make Ubisoft’s games more inclusive through innovative features.
Before Shadows, he worked on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Immortals Fenyx Rising. “It comes down to being inclusive,” Bedard said. “I wanted to create worlds and games where everyone feels welcome, and is able to play their way. This is a mission statement for Ubisoft.”
Accessibility: More Than Just Features
For an outsider, creating a more inclusive game might sound like a straightforward task—just drop in a menu full of toggles that players can turn on and off. The reality is much more complex than that. Accessibility features need to be baked into the project from the start.
“When we do a game like Shadows,” Bedard explained, “we basically start with a plan, we validate that plan, and we meet our players.
Then we gather all that feedback and ask what we can do. Those workshops are so precious because we get feedback like this: Your subtitles are some of the best, but sometimes the way the line is written is ambiguous! I’m not sure what I’m deciding!
This is something that’s not so complicated to do when you have a plan and plan it early.”
Bedard cited several examples of where early planning allowed his team to create a stronger accessibility suite. Take, for example, Shadows’ world map, which allows players to more easily find the icons and locations they’re looking for. That idea came from a conversation with a legally blind player who noted that it would be helpful if he could sort the map to only show forts.
Accessibility in Action: Real-Life Examples
The innovations in Assassin’s Creed Shadows reflect this commitment to accessibility. You can map combo strings to a single button press, toggle more descriptive subtitles that indicate tone of voice and more clearly show who is speaking, or turn on a screen reader that will say how close you are to nearby objectives as you’re traveling.
These ideas were baked in from the start, making it easy for the team to expand on them. Shadows recently received a Nintendo Switch 2 release, which Bedard said went smoothly thanks to that foundational planning phase. “The first goal for us was to offer the same level of quality in the experience in terms of accessibility, either by design or through features and options,” he said. “That said, the Switch 2 offers new schemes of interactions, notably with the touch screen, so this was an opportunity to support some of them in ways that could be intuitive, while always keeping the initial offer available.”
Collaboration for a More Inclusive Gaming Space
The spirit of collaboration is key to making gaming a more welcoming space for all players. “One thing we really pushed for with Shadows was the auto-description cinematics,” Bedard said. “It was something that was a first for Assassin’s Creed and I was really proud of it. In the end, we were beaten to the finish line by Star Wars Outlaws. That made us the second at Ubisoft!
But I wasn’t pissed or angry. I was like, damn, I didn’t see that one coming, but well done! Together, we win.”
Bedard’s philosophy on accessibility extends beyond just the technical features and into a broader understanding of personalization and user experience. “Accessibility often takes the form of features,” he said. “However, there’s such a thing as accessible design.
This can only happen if you consider things early. The legend on the world map is a perfect example. If I had come with that idea at the end of production, we might have had other fish to fry and it would have become harder to make that choice.”
