SpecialEffect, the UK-based gaming and disability charity, has announced that over 90 industry partners, including gaming giants such as Xbox, Supercell, and EA, are backing its flagship One Special Day campaign on October 6.
The campaign will offer gamers the opportunity to support SpecialEffect by purchasing qualifying titles from the partner companies, who will in turn donate some or all of the resulting revenue. The titles will be available through the One Special Day Steam Promotion (October 5-8) and the Mobile Promotion to be held on October 6.
“Once again we’ve been overwhelmed by the level of support from the games industry for One Special Day,” said SpecialEffect CEO and founder Dr. Mick Donegan. “The backing we receive from the industry and their communities is phenomenal, and without it we simply couldn’t bring a better quality of life to so many people across the world.
“As well as funding our one-to-one work with people with physical disabilities, it enables our research and partnership work with developers and manufacturers, ensuring we can continue our ever-increasing global impact on video games accessibility.”
The SpecialEffect of Accessibility
The support of SpecialEffect’s partners and their communities helps the charity reach thousands of disabled people every year, with the organisation working with a team of therapists and technical specialists to help bring the joy of gaming to those who may otherwise be unable to access it. In turn, SpecialEffect passes its learnings on to hardware and software developers to help lower the entry barriers for gaming, allowing them to make their products more accessible to people all over the world.
In addition to the One Special Day campaign, partner studios such as Third Kind Games, Sumo Group and PlayStation London will host a variety of studio events and fundraising initiatives including live streams, game jams and even abseiling.
Since its inception in 2016, One Special Day has raised over $2 million for SpecialEffect. Among the ways the charity is helping disabled people are the BubbleBusters project – which provides telepresent robots to help those in medical isolation reconnect with education and loved ones – and the SpecialEffect development kit, a free resource created for developers looking to improve motor accessibility of their games from launch.
The devkit has received an incredibly positive reaction and is already being used by developers of all scales worldwide.
For more information on SpecialEffect, visit the official website.
