Finding out whether a game has narrated menus or proper subtitles before you buy it should be getting easier. The Accessible Games Initiative said on November 2 that six major game companies have begun putting its shared accessibility tags on their games: Electronic Arts, Google (for YouTube Playables), Nintendo of America, Riot Games, Ubisoft and Xbox.
According to the Entertainment Software Association's announcement, EA, Google, Nintendo of America and Riot are the new arrivals. They join Ubisoft and Xbox, which were already using the tags.
Where to find them
The ESA's release lists where each company shows the tags:
- Electronic Arts: on a game's page in the EA app or on EA.com.
- Google: on YouTube Playables, under each game's "Game Info", on mobile and web.
- Nintendo of America: in the "About this item" section of Nintendo.com game pages, with the full tag list at nintendo.com/us/store/games/tags.
- Riot Games: on a dedicated accessibility page.
- Ubisoft: on each game's purchase page.
- Xbox: on its accessibility games browse page, xbox.com/en-US/games/browse/accessibility.
The pages already show the scale. Riot's accessibility page lists tags for League of Legends, Valorant, Teamfight Tactics, League of Legends: Wild Rift, Legends of Runeterra and 2XKO. 2XKO's list, for example, includes Narrated Menus, Chat Speech-to-Text & Text-to-Speech and Playable with Buttons Only. Riot says the features are validated for each game's current live build, and adds that the tags describe what a game offers and "cannot account for every player's individual needs."
Ubisoft's own list of tagged games, dated October 13, says 80 Ubisoft games have added the tags to their product pages. It names titles including Anno 2070, Assassin's Creed II, Rayman Legends and Watch Dogs Legion.
The limits
There are a few catches. The ESA says the tags are available only in US English for now. Adoption is voluntary, and the tags can sit alongside other accessibility labelling systems already on the market. That means a missing tag probably shouldn't be read as proof that a game lacks a feature; it may simply not have been tagged.
"Finding a game with the accessibility features you prefer should be straightforward," Daniella Decker, executive director of the Accessible Games Initiative, said in the release. She called the tags "a shared language that makes accessibility features easier to recognize and games easier to discover," and invited the rest of the industry to join.
The ESA says developer criteria, usage guidance and assets for companies that want to adopt the tags are on accessiblegames.com.
Mason's take: Six names on a press release is not the big part of this story. The big part is that the same 24 labels now mean the same thing on Nintendo's store, Xbox, the EA app and Riot's games. Accessibility information has always been there for players willing to hunt for it, and a shared vocabulary turns that hunt into a filter. The obvious gap is that PlayStation and Steam are not among the six. Until the biggest storefronts join, players will still be checking more than one place.
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