Around two and a half years ago, in August 2021, EA initially announced their Accessibility Patent Pledge, an initiative where the company would make available for royalty-free use a series of video game accessibility patents. The intent of the pledge was explained as allowing other game developers to learn from their accessibility innovations, and providing clarity that, legally, other developers were free to emulate the accessibility implementations seen in some of EA’s existing titles.
The initial batch of patents included a patent covering the Ping System for online communication seen in Apex Legends, as well as a series of other patents designed to improve gameplay visibility for various kinds of vision impacted gamers.
A year later, in December 2022, EA added a further six patents to the pledge, including patents covering in-game voice control functionality, and a patent designed to offer alternative control schemes based on player behaviour. EA also announced that they would be making Fortik, a software tool designed to automatically detect if text meets accessibility standards for size and legibility, open source for any game developer to make use of.
Today, EA announced via a press release that they are making four additional patents available for royalty free use, as well as making a photosensitivity trigger detection tool called IRIS Open Source effective immediately.
EA’s Newly Royalty Free Accessibility Patents
The first patent being made available for royalty free use is for Automated Player Control Takeover, and is described by EA as covering “a system that auto-detects when a player stops engaging with the game and converts their player-controlled character to a system-driven character resembling the player’s gameplay style. This technology can help aid people with disabilities (e.g., motor, cognitive, visual) that may experience moments during which they cannot immediately or sufficiently interact with a game”.
The second patent is titled “Adaptive Gaming Tutorial System”, and according to EA it “provides players guidance on how to perform in-game commands and techniques in a way that is tailored to each players’ skill or play style. This technology can aid people with disabilities by providing custom guidance intended specifically to reduce their particular barriers with playing the game”
The third is titled “Route Navigation System”, and covers systems seen in Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, specifically “a system which generates navigation routes and displays navigation aiding lines to direct players through large and complex game environments. This technology is good for cognitive and visual accessibility, assisting players that may find it difficult to navigate through game worlds”.
And lastly, the forth patent is titled Animated and Personalized Coach for Video Games, and apparently covers “a system that provides an animated and personalized coach that gives players in-game and out-of-game insights to improve their performance in the game. The animation of the coach makes it easier for players to digest and implement the insights, and helps players maximize their enjoyment of the game”.
Looking at these patents broadly from an outside perspective, they do all seem to cover valuable areas of accessibility support. From providing momentary automated character control for players who might have to cease engaging with a game with minimal notice, such as those with conditions such as IBS, through to tools designed to help players with conditions such as ADHD who may struggle to focus on dry, text based tutorials reliably, all of these patents cover use cases that make immediate sense in their usefulness.
IRIS Open Source Photosensitivity Software
Moving onto IRIS, the newly open source photosensitivity software, the program will apparently help to automate detection of rapid flashing or visual detail changes which could act as common triggers for people prone to photosensitivity aggravated conditions.
An automated program obviously cannot guarantee safety for photosensitive players by itself, but a tool like this can, in theory, help to catch possible issues early on in development, and catch potential triggers at development stages prior to bringing in photosensitive consultants to a project.
This could help reduce risk the to those photosensitive consultants, as well as help catch potential triggers early enough in development that altering visual effects isn’t as difficult to implement as it might be much later in development, with other systems layered on top of an implemented effect.
While I think it’s undoubtedly a positive that EA is making IRIS open source as a tool for other developers to access and use in their development, I do still feel a tiny bit conflicted about EA’s approach to patenting accessibility technology, and then making it available later via royalty free agreements. In principle I find it difficult to fully support the idea of any one company having the power or the right to patent and own an accessibility concept in this way, with discretionary power to refuse royalty free use to a specific party should they wish. However, over the past two and a half years it has seemed to be that EA’s intent here is sincere. If someone is going to own these accessibility patents, if they’re going to patent these concepts, I suppose I would prefer it to be the company that seems to be committing long term to making their patents available for public use and use by other game developers.
For a few years now, I’ve been publicly wondering why certain accessibility technologies popularised by specific companies, such as High Contrast Mode visuals being popularised by PlayStation’s first party studios, aren’t being more commonly mimicked by other major game developers. I suspect, in part at least, it’s due to the fear that there’s no guarantee PlayStation wouldn’t try to assert that, legally, the concept is theirs. I don’t think in a practical sense that’s a concern, but I can see why a lawyer might worry about that.
Given that context, EA making it clear that they own these patents, but are encouraging others to freely use them, does create a kind of legal clarity that is likely to make other developers feel more confident using the ideas within these patents.
I want to have hope that EA’s patent releasing strategy can be trusted. If nothing else, I can’t deny that their open-sourcing of specific software is nothing but a positive for the industry.
Any company that is making steps forward in accessessibility should really be sharing how they’re doing that because accessibility is I think one place in this industry where we shouldn’t be competing and keeping little industry secrets specific to one company. Share what you learn within accessibility, so that the industry as a whole can be better.