As promised earlier this year, Valve have given Steam developers the power to tag their games as having certain accessibility features, including narrated game menus, ways of differentiating visual elements that don’t rely on colour, and touch-only interaction. You’ll now be able to search for games with these tags, and view the full list of accessibility features on each game’s Steam page.
The update is based on feedback from developers as well as players with disabilities, according to Valve. Participating devs can make use of the system by means of a software wizard – ah, I find it vaguely comforting that people still call this kind of program a “wizard” – which walks them through each accessibility category. Valve say that “over 5000 applications” have already made use of the new tags.
“It’s not required, but highly recommended because of how much easier it will be for players with accessibility needs to find these games,” they note in a blog post. “We’ve worked to make it as easy as possible for developers to indicate these features are available by using feedback to standardize these options as much as possible.”
The new accessibility tags are broadly divided into “visual”, “audio”, “gameplay” and “input”. The “gameplay” bracket includes “adjustable difficulty” and “save anytime”, while under “visual” we find options like “camera comfort”, which lets players “adjust or disable uncomfortable camera movement such as screen shaking, camera bob, or motion blur”.
You can read a full breakdown on Steamworks, including Valve’s notes on why each option is important to players.
The selection of taggable features could probably do with some expansion, and the FAQ descriptions themselves are rather brief and broad. When the accessibility tags were announced in April, accessibility-focussed website Can I Play That suggested that Valve should base their system on the existing Accessible Games Initiative, which aims to standardise accessibility tagging across every game store, to avoid confusing players.
“According to the list in the documentation there is a lot of overlap, and it’s mostly Steam that is missing a few tags,” Can I Play That wrote. “Steam’s version also uses some different names and descriptions. Perhaps most importantly, there also seem to be differences in the criteria.”
Still, I’m glad to see this kind of thing from Valve. There’s certainly a business case for it, inasmuch as options for players with impaired vision need to be justified in terms of the balance sheet. According to the World Health Organisation, 1.3 billion people worldwide “experience a significant disability”. Back in 2023, our James wrote a feature on custom and adaptive controllers in particular, discussing how corporate profit motives inevitably limit the options, together with the lingering problem of ableist players perceiving accessibility features as ‘cheating’.