An Escape Room Experience That Changed Our Perspective on Accessibility

Recently, we received an email from a couple who were planning to celebrate their wedding anniversary by playing an escape room together.

Both guests are completely blind.

Before making their reservation, they asked us a question we had never been asked before:

Could two blind players actually play one of our escape rooms and solve the puzzles themselves?

They made one thing very clear. They did not want someone to give them answers or solve the puzzles for them. They were perfectly comfortable receiving verbal descriptions of visual information when necessary, but they wanted the thinking, decisions, and solutions to be their own.

That question made us look at our games from an entirely different perspective.

We Had to Look at Our Own Game Differently

When we examined our rooms specifically from the perspective of someone who cannot see, we quickly realized that our current games were not designed with blind players in mind.

There are written clues, colors, numbers, visual patterns, and objects that normally need to be located visually.

At the same time, House of Things contains many mechanical, electronic, and physical puzzles. Players interact with objects, activate mechanisms, discover relationships between different elements, and cause things to happen throughout the rooms.

That gave us an idea.

What if we provided access to the visual information without providing the solutions?

We decided to try.

Making the Game Playable Without Solving It for Them

When our guests arrived for their anniversary experience, we accompanied them through House of Things.

As they entered each new area, we described the room and the objects around them. When they wanted to investigate something, we helped them locate it. When information could only be perceived visually, we described what was there.

But we tried to maintain one important rule:

Describe the information. Don't interpret it.

From there, the decisions belonged to the players.

They decided what might be important. They discussed possibilities. They connected clues. They tested their ideas. And they solved the puzzles themselves.

The result?

They successfully completed House of Things with 10 minutes remaining.

But what stayed with us afterward wasn't the time on the clock.

It was what the experience taught us.

Accessibility Doesn't Necessarily Mean Easier

Perhaps the most important lesson was surprisingly simple:

They didn't need easier puzzles. They needed access to the information required to solve them.

There is an important difference.

If a sighted player sees that a light changes color, that player has received a piece of information. A blind player doesn't necessarily need someone to explain what that information means, they need another way to receive it.

Could a change in light also be accompanied by a sound?

Could certain information be represented through texture or shape instead of relying entirely on color?

Could physical movement, vibration, sound, or tactile elements communicate information that would otherwise only be visual?

These questions began to change the way we thought about puzzle design.

Could Accessibility Create Better Escape Rooms?

Designing an escape room that can be played independently by blind and visually impaired players would be a very different design challenge.

We also learned from this experience that true accessibility involves much more than simply modifying a few puzzles. Navigation, safety, written information, room layout, interactions between objects, and the way clues are communicated would all need to be considered.

So we don't want to make a promise today that our next escape room will be completely accessible to every player. Good accessible design requires research, testing, experience, and input from the people who would actually use it.

But we can say something else with confidence:

Accessibility is now something we will think about more carefully when designing our future games.

When creating new puzzles, we can ask questions we weren't asking before.

Does this information have to be visual?

Could there be another way to discover it?

Can sound, touch, movement, or physical interaction become part of the puzzle?

Can we make something more accessible without reducing its difficulty or changing what makes it fun?

We may not always have the perfect solution. Some concepts may simply be difficult to adapt. But asking these questions at the design stage is already very different from trying to solve accessibility problems after a game has been built.

Sometimes Our Guests Teach Us

We design escape rooms because we enjoy creating unusual experiences, puzzles, mechanisms, and stories for other people to discover.

But occasionally, the people who come to play our games make us discover something.

This was one of those occasions.

Two guests came to celebrate their wedding anniversary and successfully completed House of Things with 10 minutes remaining.

They also gave us an opportunity to experience our own game from a perspective we had never seriously considered before.

And perhaps that is the most valuable lesson we took from the experience:

Better design begins by considering how different people experience the same world.

We don't yet know exactly how this experience will influence our future escape rooms.

But we do know that the next time we sit down to design a puzzle, accessibility will be one more question on the table.

And that's a lesson worth carrying forward.

— The Escape De Facto Team