Accessibility Research

Accessibility isn’t an afterthought, it should be part of every product’s planning. It’s something I care about deeply and know how much it matters – years ago, my family missed out on features that could’ve made life easier. That’s one of the reasons I chose UX, I want to help build products designed for everyone.

Improving Candy Crush Soda's Audio Menu

44% of Candy Crush Soda players experience some challenges when playing the game.

To address this, our team added customizable audio settings so each player can choose how they’d like to experience the music and sound effects.

The task

I led the project to test Candy Crush Soda’s new audio menu. We invited players with hearing impairments to our Stockholm office for a focus-group discussion, followed by an in-person usability test to see how they used this feature.

The outcome

We refined the audio menu for clarity before rolling it out to all players. A key takeaway was that although players knew how they wanted to experience the sound, the option labels alone weren’t descriptive enough, so we added brief explanations for each setting.

My role & Impact

This was my first accessibility project at King. Under the mentorship of an accessibility expert, I wrote the focus-group script, led the in-person session, planned the usability tests, analyzed the data, and shared insights with the team.

Integrating these changes into a 10-year-old game wasn’t easy, but players with and without hearing impairments benefited greatly. We’ve since heard that the audio feels more enjoyable than ever.

Raising Accessibility Awareness to the Studio

At a company-wide in-person event, the Candy Crush Soda UXR team set out to raise studio-wide awareness of accessibility best practices. We handed out visual-impairment simulation glasses and invited everyone to play for them to experience firsthand how our players with visual difficulties interact with the game.

The task

If a person never had trouble with their eyesight, it’s hard to know what a visual impairment really feels like. To help people step into that experience, we picked up six types of simulation glasses, each one simulating a different vision challenge.

As a heuristic evaluation practice, we asked participants to wear one or more pairs while playing Candy Crush Soda for as long as they wanted. After each session, they wrote down their reactions, feelings, and ideas for improvement on post-it notes in a whiteboard.

After the event, we turned all the sticky notes into an affinity diagram. Then, using AI tools, we analyzed hundreds of post-it notes for each type of simulated impairment and suggested game improvements to test with players who experience vision impairments.

The outcome

This evaluation had the objective to build more empathy and spark a better understanding of accessibility practices, not to replace actual experiences of people with visual impairments.

Although the results are part of a heuristic evaluation, people from the studio gained firsthand awareness of how certain elements and features feel for players with visual disabilities.

Those reflections inspired our game designers to brainstorm ways to adjust the gameboard for a more accessible experience, which was later tested in person with players who actually live with visual impairments.

My Role & Impact

In this project, I was responsible for organizing the event’s activity. After my accessibility mentor suggested the idea of testing the game with simulation glasses, I took on the rest of the coordination as my project scope: working with event organizers, preparing materials, briefing assistant researchers, analyzing the data, and compiling a report with our findings.

I also thought about readers who wouldn’t have the chance to try this themselves – how would they know what glaucoma looks like in the game?

To solve this, I tested every pair of glasses and designed screens of the gameboard under each simulated condition. Although I don’t have a visual impairment and everyone’s experience differs, these images give an idea of what many of our players face when they play.

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