Real Women of Gaming

Raft has been my hyper-fixation for at least a month now. It’s a game that I can play with both of my best friends, Crymson and Meket. It’s relaxing, and has a variety of different things to do. When I play with Crymson, I’m the cook; I also fish and take care of the animals. When I play with Meket, I cook, fish, explore Islands and craft things. You may be thinking, Well Van, it’s obvious you play this frequently, so it must be accessible. 

Well, kind of.

Raft is another game that is only accessible because I have adaptive equipment. I remapped the buttons to my special mouse, so I can play with one hand. I still have to use the keyboard for some things, but they’re actions that I have to do very infrequently.

Most of the things you do are routed to 3 keys: LMB, RMB and E. I remapped E to my Mouse Button 4, and TAB (the inventory and crafting menu) to MB5, then I was good to go.The thumbstick on my mouse is already programmed as WASD, so I don’t need to worry about that, thankfully.

There is a lot of Jumping in Raft: jumping puzzles, having to jump out of the ocean quickly to avoid a shark bite, having to jump onto other crafts or Oil Rigs from the ocean. I jump by clicking my thumbstick. Unfortunately, it doesn’t register moving forward while jumping, so some places are harder for me to access and some places are inaccessible to me completely. Now that I think about it, I wonder if I can remap my way around that. Will keep you posted. 

For my vision impairment, it would be nice if the notes in the journal could be read using text-to-speech. If you have auditory processing issues, like I do, I recommend turning the Music volume to 0 and turning the ambiance sound low. It will make it easier to hear when the seagulls are attacking your scarecrow/crops, and to hear when the shark attacks your raft. There’s no dialogue in the game at all, so there’s no need for subtitles.

Raft doesn’t have an Accessibility Options menu at all. The only real accessibility options that I found were the ability to remap keybinds, which is the bare minimum accessibility requirement, and enable a “Motion Sickness Mode.” The motion sickness mode ensures smooth sailing on the ocean so nobody gets simulated sea sickness. The motion sickness mode is pretty great. I don’t get simulated motion sickness anymore, but I used to have it really badly, so I appreciate that that’s included.

As much as I love Raft, I have to say, it’s not very accessible to persons with certain disabilities on its own. However, with adaptive equipment, it’s great.

I’m unsure if it’s controller compatible on PC, so I’m not certain if the Xbox Adaptive controller can be used with it. If you know, please let us know in the comments below!