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TL;DRAt The Escape Effect, everyone is welcome and we pride ourselves on being fully ADA accessible. Right from the very start in the design phase, we made sure our rooms could accommodate players with additional needs, ensuring everyone can have fun.
At The Escape Effect, we pride ourselves on being inclusive of all types of people. Every player is unique, and we embrace those differences! We want to give everybody the chance to play all of our games, without having to worry about how they’ll get around. Escape rooms are group activities, and it’s no fun if somebody is forced to sit on the sidelines. It’s especially bad if they have to sit aside because the game does not allow them to access the next room. That’s why we work hard to make accessible escape rooms. From the room layouts to puzzle designs, we make sure that each part of the room can be enjoyed by everyone.
Making an accessible escape room is a process that takes a lot of planning. Different people can have specific needs, and we want our games to accommodate them. Our design and build team worked very hard to make sure as many people as possible could enjoy the games. Today, let’s take a look at how we make our games fun for all types of players.
What is accessibility?
For the context of this article, “accessibility” refers to accessible building design. That is, making sure that people are able to navigate a space comfortably even if they have wheelchairs or other mobility aids. The rules covering this subject are the ADA Standards for Accessible Design, which is part of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA is a law that prevents discrimination against people with disabilities (of any type, not just limited mobility). The law is intended to ensure that everybody is treated fairly, and that reasonable accommodations are in place for people who need them. It is very long and complex document that covers many different circumstances.
Where accessible building design is concerned, the Standards for Accessible Design lays out the guidelines for mobility accommodations. This document, much like the ADA itself, covers almost every situation where they might be necessary (including specific rules for mini-golf facilities). Commercial buildings are expected to follow these guidelines in order to be accessible to people with disabilities. Following these guidelines is how The Escape Effect is able to make accessible escape rooms.
We’re not going over the ADA documents today. To cover them in-depth would go well beyond the scope of this article. We’re mentioning the ADA guidelines to show the standards that we follow when designing accessible escape rooms. While the Standards for Accessible Design don’t explicitly mention escape rooms in any sub-section, the other guidelines are clear. They offer the foundational information that needed to allow as many people as possible to enjoy our games.
Building the lobby
When The Escape Effect was first being built, we made sure the main hallway was big enough for anyone to get through, even if they use a wheelchair. The back hall also has enough space for guests to access the bathroom, which is a comfortable single-occupant room. The lobby itself is a clean space with plenty of room to move around in. We have a few seats nestled against the wall, and we make sure to keep the floor clutter-free. Designing our lobby and hallway to be accessible for guests was the starting point for everything else.
In addition to being accessible, we want our lobby to look good! Decorations and furniture arrangements need to give our guests plenty of room to move around in. They also need to be stylish. The Escape Effect’s general design aesthetic is a mixture of modern and art deco. The classic ornamental style of the 1920s can be seen throughout our lobby. Our posters and the hallway wall panels feature detailed frames, while furniture is sleek and minimalist in style.
The combination of design motifs makes it easy for us to keep decorations stylish, without them getting in anyone’s way. Nothing protrudes from the walls into the walkway. We don’t need cluttered tables in the middle of the floor to make the lobby feel comfortable. We keep it simple, clean, and—most importantly—accessible.
Of course, this was only the absolute bare minimum for creating an accessible escape room venue. A wide hallway and comfortable bathrooms don’t mean anything if guests can’t also play the games. Everything, from the doors to the escape rooms and the hallways within them, has been designed to meet ADA guidelines in order to let everyone have fun here.
Designing our escape rooms
Building an accessible escape room is a lot of work. We have to choose a theme, design puzzles, plan the flow of the rooms, build props, and so on. Set design, where the look and feel of the room is decided, is a discussion all on its own. A lot of time spent is testing, remaking, and double-checking each prop to make sure it looks good and functions as it should. The props need to be durable. The furniture needs to be secured. The lights and electronics need to work properly. All of the audio needs to sound good.
It’s “all hands on deck” during the building process, and it can look like quite a mess! Ladders and paint cans and sawdust abound. At the end of it all, we get to stand back and see the players enjoy the fruits of our labor.
Planning the layout
Before any of the building can begin, the layout of the escape room must be established. Each escape room has a unique design. A Knight To Escape is the biggest escape room at The Escape Effect, but even our smallest game still needs to be fully accessible. Creating an accessible escape room layout means making sure that every door and hallway, however dark and narrow, is still wide enough for a wheelchair to pass through.
When setting up the doors, it’s not just the size of the doorway that matters. The position of a door and surrounding walls can be a factor for wheelchair users. If a door can’t fully open because of a nearby wall, a wheelchair may not be able to navigate around it. Tight corners can also be an issue, along with narrow hallways. This also applies if something protrudes from the wall and into the walkway.
To avoid these problems, we made sure our door frames had enough space around them to let doors open wide. We also made sure that doors would open in the right direction to minimize how much space was taken up. Much like the main hallway from the lobby to the bathroom, any halls within the escape rooms were built wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs.
Details like this may seem small, but they make a big difference in the overall usability of a space. Deciding on the layout early on also helps to ensure that the overall set design doesn’t hinder accessibility. For example, if we built a room before choosing which direction the door should open, it might have created a problem. We may have accidentally put a decoration in the path of the door. That would have risked damaging the door or decoration when the door opened. Thankfully, our planning ensured that we did not have any problems like that.
Designing the puzzles
Puzzles are the heart and soul of escape rooms, and we put our own hearts and souls into designing them. Each escape room has a distinct puzzle style, from the hands-on dungeon of A Knight To Escape, to the Ghostbusters-style scavenger hunt in Fright Before Your Eyes. At Odds With The Gods has twists on many classic puzzles. Sherlock Studies requires players to read through evidence to solve a mystery. No matter what type of puzzle we throw at our players, we want to make them fun for everybody. In order to do that, we have to make sure they’re accessible to everybody.
In the context of puzzles, an accessible escape room is one where the puzzles don’t require an unreasonable amount of effort to get to or solve. Important props and information is at or below eye level for a person of average height. Props that need to be moved are either light or, if they’re heavy, on wheels. This enables players to find the information or tools required to solve the puzzle without straining themselves. An escape room that requires a lot of physical effort, or one that a person cannot get through if they have limited mobility, is not an accessible escape room.
We at The Escape Effect work hard to make sure our escape rooms are as accessible as possible. Some items, like the boxes for the “sawing a woman in half” illusion in Fright Before Your Eyes, take up a fair amount floor space. However, we designed them to be easy to move out of the way. This makes Fright Before Your Eyes an accessible escape room for players. In our other games, we’ve made similar efforts to enable our guests to have fun.
As a general rule, any physical work that a player might do (such as reaching) is kept minimal. This is our starting point for designing accessible escape room puzzles. If a prop needs to be lifted or pushed aside, an average person should be able to do it without strain. If an important prop is on a shelf or wall, it should be reachable by a person of average height. However, we know that people come in all shapes and sizes. That’s why we’re happy to help any player that needs other accommodations.
What we don’t do
Our goal when designing escape rooms was to let as many people as possible, do as much as possible. To that end, we included different ways for everyone to join in. If part of a puzzle required a certain amount of mobility, such as reaching above one’s head, we included a workaround. This can be either an alternate path to where the puzzle leads, or a way for others to participate. The last thing we wanted to do was prevent someone from doing anything because of accessibility issues.
In order to make accessible escape rooms, there are a few elements that we decided against adding to the games. One major design element that we decided against was climbing stairs. Long staircases, especially if they’re narrow, do not make for accessible escape rooms. We don’t want anybody to be barred from exploring due to their mobility. That’s why we decided not to use stairs as a path to any room in our games. While one game does feature a small stair case, those stairs do not lead to another room. A person in a wheelchair can still see what’s on the stairs and participate in the rest of the game.
There are no extended crawl spaces in our games for the same reason that we don’t have stairs. Nobody is forced to hunch over in a long tunnel to get into the next room. A Knight To Escape does have a small passage that somebody has to crawl through, as seen in the picture. However, the passage is short and the room that it leads to has another door. Only one person will need to crawl, and only for a moment.
Since A Knight To Escape always has at least four players, we can ensure that someone is able to get through the passage. In keeping with accessible escape room design, the larger door is wide enough to easily fit a wheelchair through. This gives everybody the chance to reunite and enjoy the rest of the game. We didn’t put anything in the passage that other players need to see. We didn’t make that passage the only way into the next room. The other door ensures that nobody is left behind simply because they can’t crawl.
Mobility is not the only concern when designing an accessible escape room. We also took different health conditions into consideration. Conditions like epilepsy raise very important questions about how game elements will affect people. Some of our electronics do have lights on them, like the SD200 in Fright Before Your Eyes, but we don’t use flashing lights in our escape rooms.
There are also a few dim lights and candles in each of our rooms. However, those lights either have a subtle pulse or don’t flicker at all. We do not have any strobe light-style effects anywhere. They’re not even used as jump-scares or for dramatic flair. We left them out of the games in order to avoid endangering anyone that is photosensitive. We’re also able to make adjustments to certain effect lights in order to avoid any accidental strobe effects that might be generated.
In addition to these elements, you won’t find any heavy lifting in our escape rooms. As we said before, anything that needs to move is either lightweight or on wheels. We also don’t require anybody to climb a ladder or squeeze in through small spaces (by making sure none of our spaces are tight enough to constrict anyone). Our puzzles may test your mental strength, but they’re not here to test your physical limits. Accessible escape rooms should be comfortable and fun!
An accessible escape room for everyone
We’ve put a lot of thought into how unique our guests are at The Escape Effect. It’s why we can tailor our games to suit players of different experience levels. Some people like more of a challenge, and some people prefer games to be a little easier. We want to encourage and support all the ways in which our players are different. That’s why we worked extra hard to make our accessible escape rooms!
Thinking about what is required for accessible escape room design has always been part of the process. Since our games are all built in-house, we’re able to bake the idea of accessibility into the designs at the very beginning. Every decision about the games, considers how players will move around the rooms, and how we can make it easier for them.
From the moment you walk through our doors, we want you to fully enjoy your escape room experience. We don’t want anybody to feel like they’re unable to have fun with the rest of their team. Whether you need a little more light in Fright Before Your Eyes, or you want a place to sit in At Odds With The Gods, we’re more than happy to give you a hand. Paying attention to all of the details is why we were voted the #1 Entertainment Experience in Orlando.
Four great escape rooms!
Our accessible escape rooms can be played by everyone. You never have to worry about being able to join the fun! Come book an escape room today.