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As a quick aside before we begin this week’s episode of Access-Ability, a reminder that I am currently participating in a Boycott of Xbox games in support of the BDS organisation’s consumer boycott in support of Palestine. I’ll post a link in the video description to my in depth explanation, but in short I’m not currently paying for Xbox Game Pass or purchasing new 1st Party Xbox games in an attempt to apply financial pressure on Microsoft regarding their providing of technology to the IDF (Israeli Defense Force).
That said, my job is to cover video game accessibility, and some weeks the most relevant piece of accessibility news to discuss will be a story about Xbox or Microsoft. In those cases I will cover those stories, but with context reminding people of the existence of a currently ongoing consumer boycott.
That brings us to today’s story, which is in part about Xbox, but more generally focused on progress implementing a new set of standardised wordings in the accessibility space.
A few months back at the GDC Game Developers Conference 2025, a number of high profile game developers and publishers including Xbox, Nintendo, Amazon Games, EA, Ubisoft and more came together to agree on standardised names and descriptions for 24 common accessibility tags for video games. The idea was that by giving specific accessibility features standardised names, consistent descriptions, and aligned requirements, players would be able to more reliably understand what features were being offered by games, and what it meant in practice to see a feature being offered.
By making accessibility features consistent in the requirements to claim them and the names applied to them, consumer confusion could be reduced, and disabled players could more comfortably rely on understanding what accessibility options were supported in games that they wished to play.
The Accessible Games Initiative, the name for this collection of new standardised accessibility store tags, did not have a specific date for implementation by participating developers, only a general agreement that they should work toward standardising these terms.
Rewinding a bit back to 2021, Xbox were the first console manufacturer to add support for Accessibility Store Tags to their digital game storefronts on Xbox and PC. These tags allowed players to see, at a glance, which accessibility features a game would support at the point of purchase, reducing the need to check an external resource to find out if a game would support features that you as a a disabled player needed in order to be able to play a game.
The news update today is that Xbox is the first f the companies involved in the Accessible Games Initiative to have begun implementing these new standardised accessibility store tag names and descriptions into their digital storefront and developer documentation. While the old tags may still appear in some locations currently, the plan is that by July 2025 they should be updated across all Xbox storefronts and websites.
According to the Accessibility Feature Tags Version 2.0.1, all Xbox Accessibility Store Tags that have an equivalent in the Accessible Games Initiative’s set of 24 tags have now had their wordings changed to match those of the initiative. The six Xbox Accessibility Store Tags that don’t have an equivalent yet in the new initiative are retaining their current titles and descriptions. This includes Additional Accessibility Information, Accessibility on Launch, On-Demand Tutorials, Pausable, Adjustable Input Sensitivity, and Single Stick Gameplay.
Xbox updating their digital storefront to reflect these new standardised tags is an important step for the industry, as it marks the first company to take proactive steps to put these new standardised tags into action. Hopefully in the coming weeks we will see PlayStation update their accessibility store tags to match these new standards on their digital storefront, and in a perfect world I would love to see these standardised tags supported on the Switch 2’s eShop at launch in early [June]. Most of the other companies signed on as part of the Accessible Games Initiative are third party publishers, so until the major consoles update the tag wordings on their stores these other companies will be limited in their ability to engage with this new system.
A new attempted standard for accessibility terminology is a great idea for the industry on paper, but needs to be put into practice to be meaningful. I’m glad to see Xbox updating their accessibility tags to match this new standard, and hope to see the other two major console manufacturers follow suit in the coming months.
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