The Steam store and desktop client will soon be able to help players find games that feature accessibility support. If your game has accessibility features, you can now enter that information in the Steamworks ‘edit store’ section for your app.
↫ Steam announcements page
I have a lot of criticism for the Steam client application – it’s a overly complex, unattractive, buggy, slow, top-heavy Chrome engine wrapped in an ugly user interface – but this is a great change and very welcome addition to Steam. Basically, with this, game developers can indicate which accessibility features their game has, allowing users to specifically search for those features, create filters, make sure they can play the game before buying, and so on.
The client-side part of the feature is not yet available – it seems Valve is giving developers some time to fill in the necessary information – but once it is, you’ll be able to tell at a glance what accessibility a game has. Such information on the store page of games tends to be a great marketing tool, with reviews quickly pointing out if certain expected features are not present. Any game that lacks support for the Steam Deck or Proton, for instance, will often have a few reviews at the top mentioning as such, and games with invasive DRM can’t get away with that either without reviews on Steam pointing it out. I wouldn’t be surprised if these accessibility feature listings well quickly become another thing users will simply expect to be there.
Regardless, this is great news for people who rely on such features, but even if you don’t specifically – accessibility features are often just useful features, period.
This is a good thing.
Xbox is currently the leader in accessibility. They not only offer some very good hardware, they also bake features in their Xbox OS (and Windows) and also allow searching by accessibility tags in their store:
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/browse/accessibility
Their adaptive controller is great:
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/xbox-adaptive-controller
Sony is closely following suit:
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/accessories/access-controller/?
They have their own controller. But their online store selection needs more work:
https://store.playstation.com/en-us/category/eaef8ed2-84f0-4001-bbc6-5dba395f0e78/1
Nintendo does not offer one from first party, as far as I know, but there are 3rd party ones available:
https://stores.horiusa.com/flex-controller-for-nintendo-switch/
The PC / Steam going in this direction is great. The existing controllers, especially Xbox one are already fully compatible with recent Windows versions and Steam has native support. And they are extremely extensible (the “controller” itself is more of a hub, and you can add devices like mouth sticks, pedals, or anything the user has capability to with simple “audio” like jacks).
This is overall good news and should be celebrated.
Tbh accessibility support is something more games should have in the plain options instead of calling it “accessibility”.
Plenty of “atmospheric” games where you can’t distinguish shit unless you’re willing to turn your monitor’s brightness to the max.
And at best they put a high contrast mode option somewhere when they should call it “i have my monitor properly adjusted”.
“Or, you know, what about, I don’t know, fucking Yahoo!?” Or threats. The US government want this settled so the US companies can move in on european turf. And it is going to work, just like “starbucks” and “mcdonalds” failed in most places in europe, they still sell the parts. 7/11 have taken over all starbucks coffee in europe, walmart is bankrupt in the EU,