Greetings readers! Right on the heals of my Shenmue discussion, I wanted to talk about quicktime events As a refresher, quicktime events refer to those moments when you’re watching what appears to be a cutscene, but you must suddenly press a button to achieve something. Failure to press the correct button by pressing the wrong one, or not pressing it in time, results in a failure of the attempted action, which can sometimes lead to the demise of your character. How, though, do blind people deal with these moments, and what do we think of them? That’s what we’re about to talk about.

First, it’s important to note that there are basically 2 types of quicktime events. The first is one where, regardless of how many times you retry an event, or how many playthroughs of a game you do, the button you need to press never changes. These are the ones blind people are sort of OK with, because we gamers don’t typically mind memorization. If we can memorize a quicktime sequence, that becomes the bit we feel good about when going through that section of the game.

The second type is the worst for us. Quicktime events where everything changes every time cannot be memorized, so we can only rely on, pun intended here, (blind luck) to get through those moments. My first tip to game developers who intend to put quicktime events in their game is to avoid this method. Giving us the option of memorization isn’t quite an accessibility feature, but it is a nice perk.

There is another sort of quicktime event type involving directional movement along with a button, such as pointing a cursor at the proper spot before executing your button press, but that’s another can of worms I don’t think we need to open. This would, in a way, be an even worse option than the random button presses, since we have no idea where a cursor would be in that situation. Telltale does this sometimes, and it’s so, so very agrivating.

So I’ve now given you an idea of how we feel about different types of quicktime events, but let us now approach the big question. When it comes to accessibility, if we’re actually talking about a game with accessibility features implemented, what should be done about quicktime events? My answer might surprise some of you. I’ve heard a lot from developers that the answer to blind accessibility is to remove quicktime events entirely, or make them skippable. This, I tell you now, is the wrong approach. Well OK, in my opinion it is. You’re bound to hear several different opinions on the subject, but hey, another key to accessibility is options. We love options!

Anyway, personally I believe the correct approach is to treat quicktime events like the rest of the game, and make them accessible. Don’t remove them and thus remove the challenge. Don’t make us skip them and potentially miss a great part of the story. To me, those are unacceptable options, and honestly, copouts. Make us feel the intensity of those moments like anyone else. Get some voiceover of the names of each button, or use text to speech. Apply this to the quicktime event so that the button we need to press is spoken right when or right before we need to press it. Do this, and you can even keep your randomized button quicktime events, because we’ll still be properly alerted.

If you don’t want to apply a voice to the button, apply a sound. Create a sound that is different for every potential button we might have to press, and play it at the time it is needed. We can memorize those as well. The important thing, though, is just to give us as close an experience to the one a sighted person has as possible. That’s what we want. We’re not asking for easy mode.

And that’s it, I suppose. Quicktime events are an interesting mechanic, and possibly far more elaborate than some thought, but they do not have to be bad things when it comes to accessibility. I guess that’s my point. With the first type of QTE, the one where buttons are never different, (Shenmue is an example of this), we can deal. Make them accessible, and we will love them. Thanks all for reading, and as always, continue to be awesome!