When Klemens Strasser designs a new game, he asks two questions: “Is it fun?” and “Can it be made accessible to everyone?”

“I scrap ideas where I can’t answer yes to both,” says Strasser, who most recently developed the beautiful nature-inspired puzzle game Art of Fauna.

Strasser’s focus on accessibility began with his first release, the 2015 beat-the-clock quiz game Elementary Minute, which earned him a Student Winner award at the 2015 Apple Design Awards.

Later that year at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, a software engineer with low vision asked Strasser why the game didn’t also support VoiceOver, Apple’s industry-leading built-in screen reader that gives audible descriptions of what’s on your screen.

“He knew it would work perfectly,” Strasser says. “He guided me along the way, and a couple of weeks later I released a VoiceOver-accessible version of the game.”

That meeting was a career-shaping moment for Strasser. “It made me realize many other developers, like me, could make their games accessible but simply hadn’t thought of it,” he says.

His 2022 release Ancient Board Game Collection was similarly informed by feedback from a player with low vision. It digitizes nine long-forgotten games, including the checkers-like latrunculi, which dates back to the first century BCE.

“It led to High-Contrast mode, where all backgrounds are removed, the game field becomes a simplified grid, and your pieces are easily distinguishable colors,” Strasser says. “The player can set all of these colors to account for any kind of color vision deficiency.”

Strasser’s commitment to accessibility is perhaps best illustrated in Art of Fauna. In this multifaceted puzzler, there are two ways to solve each level: Rearrange the jumbled artwork or rearrange the jumbled text. Each puzzle has a beautiful drawing of an animal on one side (sourced from the Smithsonian’s Biodiversity Heritage Library) and a written description on the other.

Strasser added text to the game to make it accessible to VoiceOver users, which introduced a new way to play and made the game more fun for everyone. “It’s similar to the curb cut—it not only benefits people with wheelchairs but also people pushing baby buggies. And me, when I walk with luggage to the train station,” he says.

Accessibility settings pop up when you first open the game. You’ll find options that make navigating with VoiceOver easier as well as fonts for dyslexic players. Art of Fauna also includes a “phobia filter” that hides spiders, snakes, bats, and other critters that might give you pause.

“I looked at a ton of drawings and photos of animals that made me a bit uncomfortable,” says Strasser, who reviewed over 100 images for the game and flagged any that might make players squeamish. “I received many messages from people who were super happy about the feature’s inclusion.”

Designing games with accessibility in mind from the start is much easier than trying to add features later during development—and it’s always worth the effort, Strasser says.

“Being inclusive is just the right thing to do,” he says. “If big games and apps aren’t accessible to everyone, people with disabilities are not only excluded from the experience itself but also the subculture around it. And we shouldn’t let that happen.”