Hi all,
As part of some academic gymnastics I've recently been required to perform, I have some estimated numbers about how many people play video games, how many of them have some form of disability, and specifically how many of them have visual impairment.
I thought this might be of interest, so here are the details I found when researching the topic:
The number of people who play video games globally has been rising steadily since their inception and availability to home consumers via early microcomputers in the 1970s, and as of 2018 there are an estimated 2.6 billion people in the world who play video games (Entertainment Software Association, 2018).
Of this vast number of people, it can be expected that roughly the same proportion of users will have some form of disability as in the general populace, which stands at approximately 15% of the world's population (World Health Organization, 2011). More specifically, estimates for the prevalence of visual impairment in the global populace suggest that approximately 0.48% of the populace are legally blind, 2.95% have moderate to severe visual impairment, and 2.57% have mild visual impairment (Bourne, 2017).
Applying these rates of visual disability to our game-playing user base of 2.6 billion people would then suggest that that there are presently in the region of 156 million gamers with visual disability, comprised of 12.48 million gamers who are legally blind, 76.7 million with moderate to severe visual impairment, and 66.82 million who have mild visual impairment."
The above is a quote from my (yet to be published) PhD exegesis: "Adventures in Software Engineering: Plugging HCI Gaps with Open Source Solutions".
References from the above are:
Entertainment Software Association. (2018).
Retrieved from http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/upload … _FINAL.pdf
World Health Organization. (2011). World Report on Disability 2011.
Bourne, R. R. (2017). Magnitude, temporal trends, and projections of the global prevalence of blindness and distance and near vision impairment: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Global Health, 5(9), e888-e897.