Back in April, Valve announced the Steam store would start highlighting accessibility features on games’ store pages. And now, it has. Not only can you see them in the sidebar beneath the controller support section for selected games, you can also search the store by individual accessibility features.
“This update comes after gathering valuable feedback from developers as well as players with disabilities,” Valve says in its blog post announcing the news, “and over 5,000 applications have added details about their accessibility support (with more developers updating their games each day).”
On Steam’s search page you can select “narrow by accessibility feature” to bring up a bunch of toggles like “playable without timed input” and “color alternatives”. If you know anyone who has ever bought a puzzle game and had to refund it because the puzzles demand you can tell colors apart but won’t let you tweak what those colors are, you’ll know why the latter’s important. Some accessibility features, like “save anytime” and “adjustable text size” are good for everyone to know in advance—they’re just nice things to have.
A variety of games, mostly newer ones, have already added accessibility features to their store page. Baldur’s Gate 3, for instance, boasts 10 of them, from “adjustable difficulty” to “playable without timed input”. Here’s a full list of the options, with explanations of exactly what they mean.
Gameplay
- Adjustable Difficulty: Players can adjust gameplay difficulty.
- Save Anytime: Players can save gameplay using both automatic and manual saves. Saving can be performed at any point in the game.
Visual
- Adjustable Text Size: Players can adjust text size. (In-game text, menu text, character dialog text, subtitle text)
- Subtitle Options: Players have options to customize the display of subtitles for all spoken content and essential audio information.
- Color Alternatives: Gameplay doesn’t rely on colors to communicate important information, or players have an option to adjust colors used for distinguishing information.
- Camera Comfort: Players have an option to adjust or disable uncomfortable camera movement such as screen shaking, camera bob, or motion blur, or the game doesn’t feature these effects.
Audio
- Custom Volume Controls: Players can adjust the volume of the audio. Different types of audio can be muted independently from each other.
- Narrated Game Menus: Players can listen to game menus with narrated audio.
- Stereo Sound: Players can identify how far to the left or right sounds are coming from.
- Surround Sound: Players can identify how far in any direction sounds are coming from.
Input
- Keyboard Only Option: Players can play the game with just a keyboard and no other additional input mechanisms such as a mouse or controller.
- Mouse Only Option: Players can play the game with just a mouse and no other additional input mechanisms such as a keyboard or controller.
- Touch Only Option: Players can play the game with just touch controls and no other additional input mechanisms such as a mouse, keyboard or controller.
- Playable without Timed Input: Players have an option to adjust gameplay to not require precisely timed button presses (“quick time events”) or gameplay does not require such button presses.
- Text-to-speech: Text chat can be narrated out loud in real time.
- Speech-to-text communications: Voice chat can be read as a text transcript in real time.
