EA Sports FC 26 is, if I’m being honest, not the kind of game I usually would have paid much attention to. Previously known as Fifa, this series of football games (or Soccer for Americans) has mostly passed me by over the years. I mostly know it as that series of sports games with a reputation for pretty excessive monetisation, and trust me we will talk a little about that before we’re done today.
However, as someone who closely follows accessibility efforts in the video game industry, I’ve been aware that the Fifa / EA Sports FC series has been working with disabled consultants for a while now to improve the series’ level of accessibility on a few fronts.
EA Sports FC 26 is set to release in late September 2025, and as part of a recent “Pitch Notes” article on EA’s website, several really exciting accessibility features were announced for this upcoming entry in the series. As such, I thought it was finally time I took a long overdue look at what accessibility updates are coming to this year’s take on the football franchise.
Starting with one of my favourite bits of info, EA Sports FC 26 is set to include an accessibility onboarding walkthrough when players first boot up the game. This ensures that players who need accessibility support are able to easily find it, and is particularly important for a series of games that players may not expect to find accessibility support within.
The big headline update, EA Sports FC 26 is getting the series’ first implementation of High Contrast Mode visuals. Designed to help low vision players and players with cognitive disabilities, high contrast modes typically allow players to desaturate game worlds and highlight important elements in (ideally customisable) high contrast block colours.
EA Sports FC 26’s High Contrast mode will allow players to customise the colours of their home and away teams, goalkeepers, the referee, and the ball, as well as deciding whether just the player’s outfit or their whole character model should be in high contrast. Players can also desaturate the pitch to help make these game elements more visible during play.
High Contrast Mode will be supported in all game modes, including online competitive multiplayer. This is far from a given, with titles like Call of Duty for example offering High Contrast Mode in single player campaigns but not in online multiplayer lobbies. While I can understand the fear some game developers have about high contrast modes impacting competitive player balance, it’s important that accessibility not be gated away from competitive play. If you believe high contrast mode visuals give players a competitive advantage, there’s nothing to stop non disabled players making use of them when they play online competetively too.
For players needing reduced visual clutter to focus on gameplay during matches with large numbers of players on the field, EA Sports FC 26 also features options to disable both player shadows and pitch shadows.
In terms of visual settings, the other main option being offered is a selection of colourblind filters. These are overlays designed to alter colours on screen to make them more visible to colourblind players. While I am glad this setting exists, colourblind filters are always going to be somewhat limited in their ability to support a wide range of colourblind players. I suspect a good number of colourblind players may ultimately gravitate toward using high contrast mode, where they’ll have the ability to customise the colours of important elements with a higher degree of control than an overlay might allow, to better suit their specific experiences with colour vision.
Lastly, player skills in EA Sports FC 26 are being simplified. I’ll admit freely I’m not a big player of the series, so I’ll do my best to communicate these changes as I understand them. In previous entries in the series certain skills required specific inputs, not unlike command inputs in a fighting game. A new simplified control option allows players to push the right stick in any of the main cardinal directions, and automatically execute a contextually appropriate skill. These players won’t have as much control over which skill they’re going to use, but will be able to avoid mechanically complex inputs being necessary during play.
Overall, these are all really exciting accessibility updates to see announced, particularly from what I would consider quite a “Lads” game. I like that we’re seeing accessibility support starting to creep more regularly into genres of games that have previously felt a little bit bit overlooked, and these kinds of hugely popular sports video games have such a large potential audience that includes so many people of different ages and abilities, that accessibility support feels like a really natural fit. If your dad in his 70’s with failing eyesight and arthritis wants to play a football video game, he should be able to. This kind of support could make a huge difference in opening up the series to a wider segment of the football loving population.
I will however note, as I mentioned at the start, that this series is not without existing accessibility barriers. Most notably, I can’t really praise these new accessibility updates without giving context to the series’ history with predatory microtransaction practices. Back when the series was still called Fifa, there were countless articles about how the game’s FUT (Fifa Ultimate Team) randomised player packs were one of the industry’s most egregious examples of predatory microtransactions. Players with certain cognitive disabilities impacting completionism, impulse control, and compulsive behaviours tend to be core targets for microtransaction addiction and overspending, making their presence an accessibility barrier for many.
However, with that caveat said, I am overall really positive about the direction that accessibility is going within the EA Sports FC series. I can only hope that we see these options be successful, and hopefully get adopted by similar sports series like Madden in the coming years.