Steam Adding Accessibility Features Including "Adjustable Difficulty" To Store Pages

Summary

Valve upgrading platform to improve accessibility features for gamers.
Planned features include adjustable difficulty, audio and visual options, and input features.
Developers encouraged but not required to implement new accessibility features.

While Steam is far and away the market leader when it comes to retail games on PC, Valve isn’t resting on its laurels, as they are upgrading the platform to help gamers and their purchasing decisions.

This change is designed to help gamers identify accessibility options more quickly and uniformly, eliminating guesswork when games are added to the platform.

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Steam Plans To Upgrade Accessibility Features Big-Time Soon

The change is planned for sometime this year, which Valve announced in a Steamworks Developer post (via GamingOnLinux). Players will see new accessibility features such as adjustable difficulty, narrated game menus and a lot more.

Some of the new features include:

Gameplay options, like adjustable difficulty
Audio accessibility features, including custom volume controls and narrated game menus
Visual accessibility features, including adjustable text size and color alternatives
Input options, which include chat speech-to-text and text-to-speech

Players will even be able to use the store’s search functionality for specific accessibility features such as searching for a game that will let gamers save anytime, narrated game menus, games that offer chat text-to-speech, adjustable difficulty and more.

For now, Valve says developers are not required to comply with these new features but they re “highly recommended” since it makes connecting their games to players looking for it much easier.

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This is a step in the right direction for the platform and gaming in general. With more and more people gaming these days, it’s important for developers to understand that not everyone who plays games is a young person, or has full access to their faculties.

Hopefully, this is something Sony, Microsoft and even Nintendo take a look at and follow suit. This is another step by Valve to help gamers on their platform. Just this February, Valve started banning Steam games that force players to watch in-game ads.

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