Over the Barriers

The problem

Gaming events are rarely built for disabled players. Accessibility, where it exists, is added at the end: a ramp at the door of an experience designed for someone else. Over the Barriers is a tournament that starts from the opposite assumption. Venue, hardware, format and communications are all decided with access as the first question rather than the last.

The event existed before I was involved. It runs out of the Tampere Accessibility Unit and has earlier editions behind it, including ones that ran under the Finnish name Esteet Nurin. My part is the 2025 edition.

Over the Barriers 2025 event page at TACCU

What I did

I led the organisation and running of the 2025 edition, together with a team. That covered four things:

• Accessibility provisions. Adaptive controllers, physical access, quiet space, and a tournament format built around mixed-ability play.
• Sponsor relations. Working with Xbox as partner, and with Nokia Arena as venue.
• Participant logistics. Registration, scheduling, and the arrival experience, which is where access problems tend to surface first.
• Volunteer coordination. Recruiting, briefing and running the volunteer team on the day.

None of it was solo work. The tournament runs on a team, and the parts that worked best were the parts where more than one person had thought about them.

The written outcome

We are writing the event up as a book chapter, Designing and Organising Accessible Esports Events, with Pauliina Baltzar and Markku Turunen. It is intended for the Critical Event Studies Research Series at Routledge. It is still in writing rather than accepted.

I also co-presented the work with Pauliina Baltzar at the Spring Game Researcher Seminar, Tampere University Game Research Lab, in May 2026.

See the publication list for full details.

What I take from it

Accessible event design has two halves. There is the designed half: the hardware, the physical access, the accommodations you can plan for. And there is the adaptive half: the structures that let an event respond to an access need nobody anticipated, without making the person experiencing it do the work of asking. The second half is harder, and it is where most of the learning was.