When shopping for a game on Steam you’ll soon be able to filter results by accessibility feature. The filter options are coming some time later this year, say Valve in a Steamworks update post, and will include tickboxes for alternative colour options, adjustable difficulty, menu narration, and subtitle options, among some other useful categories.
When searching through the store you’ll be able to use the usual filter side bar (the bit that lets you filter by genre, for instance) to “narrow by accessibility feature”. Some of the stuff you’ll be able to tick here includes “adjustable text size”, “camera comfort”, and “mouse only option”. These features will also be listed on individual game store pages.
“Steam Users will be able to view accessibility features for a specific game on the right hand side of the store page,” they say. This is the part of the game’s page that commonly tells you key info, like if the game is single player or includes controller support. The post shows an example of Portal 2, which includes features marked as good for accessibility, such as “custom volume controls” and “save anytime” (although quicksave is a common enough convenience feature it’s also valued by a lot of users for accessibility too).
For this to work well, however, developers will have to self-report the accessibility options their games include by following a step-by-step form in the wizardy innards of Steam.
“As part of the ‘edit store’ section for each game in Steamworks, you’ll find a new questionnaire to describe your accessibility support,” the post tells developers. “Through this questionnaire, you will self-identify the level of accessibility that your game supports.
“It’s not required, but highly recommended because of how much easier it will be for players with accessibility needs to find these games. 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.”
It’s not clear when the extra filter options will appear in the Steam store – Valve say it can only happen “once we’ve given developers time to work on it from their end”.
Valve have posted a list of how their various accessibility options will be defined. It’s useful, but the accessibility-focused games website Can I Play That have suggested it might be better if Valve instead ran with the definitons set out by the Accessible Game Initiative, which wants to standardise these tags across all stores – Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo and so on.
Judging from Valve’s tag list you might still have to do extra digging to find out the exact features in the game’s options. The definitions are broad and don’t always describe the precise features of each game. For example, if Gasbag Goblinz 2 is tagged with “camera comfort” that could mean it lets the player disable motion blur, but not camera shake – both of which are covered by the same wide category. This is a difficult thing to account for, given that every game is wildly different, and it looks like Valve will leave it up to the devs to be more openly specific about their features.
