Purple Tuesday
Blog
Our commitment to the disabled customer experience on Purple Tuesday
Purple Tuesday is a global social movement for improving the customer experience for disabled people and their families 365 days a year, with events taking place on 1st November across the UK, US, UAE, Pakistan and Malaysia.
Last year’s November event reached over 19 million people and involved over 7,000 social media conversations, with fifteen industries represented by the group of Purple Tuesday Sector Partners - all working together to influence changes in their sectors. This year we hope to be a part of an equally remarkable effort.
To get involved, organisations must make at least one new commitment to improve their accessibility and practice, and implement that improvement in the next 12 months. For us here at Jagex, supporting charities and initiatives is far more than simply fundraising. Important as that is – it’s also about working to amplify our charity partner’s messages of support and education to our communities, and contributing our own skills and time to enable them to be even more effective in the essential work they do.
Which is why we want the community to be at the heart of any discussions in this space, particularly the disabled community. So to do our part on this Purple Tuesday, we are committing to implementing accessibility improvements in 2023 across both Old School and RuneScape.
On the 1st of November, we will open discussion threads on our social channels, including Twitter, Reddit and Discord, to encourage people to share their feedback and experiences. We’ll also be linking to a survey with some questions so players can send their feedback. We want to know how their disabilities impact how they play our games, whether it’s vision or motor impairments, neurodivergence, or anything else; we want to hear about it! We’ll then take that feedback, collate it, and implement fixes to the game. We hope to be rolling out these improvements – with specific dates for specific changes TBC.
Our current lead initiative, that’s in the prototype stage, is a High-contrast mode for RuneScape. We’ve had success with it so far, and we think it’ll be a big win for the game, particularly for the players with visual impairments. We want the High-contrast mode to allow players to highlight important entities in single, block colours to help them stand out, as well as include options to greyscale the environment. We also want to allow players to customise what colour these highlights are to help account for those with colour blindness.
We look forward to launching new initiatives in 2023 and beyond and can’t wait to hear from players about their experiences.
If you want to learn more about Purple Day and be part of the growing movement of disability-committed organisations, visit the website here.