Why Now’s the Perfect Time to Add Accessibility Tags to the Switch 2 Eshop

A few weeks ago back in late October 2025, it was revealed during a Nintendo Direct presentation that Kirby Air Riders would be getting a series of accessibility settings added to the game, in their own dedicated accessibility menu. While this may signal a Sakurai led initiative rather than a broader step forward for Nintendo as a publisher, it is still an exciting moment of advancement for those of us hoping to see Nintendo catch up to the accessibility support options of their console publishing competition.

Kirby Air Riders had a public playtest demo available this past weekend, and it was super exciting to get to check out a few of the game’s accessibility features first hand, even if unfortunately only a limited number of settings from the full game were available in this short slice of gameplay. 

Interestingly, if the demo is representative of the finished game, it seems for example that visual accessibility settings might only be able to be altered via their presets, and not individually tweaked for a custom setup. Hopefully this is not the case in the full release of the game, as not being able to set the widest field of view without also turning on all possible screen guideline borders isn’t ideal.

However, playing the playtest demo for Kirby Air Riders ended up getting me thinking about a different but related topic, Nintendo’s involvement in the Accessible Games Initiative.

As a brief reminder, back in March of 2025 a group called the Accessible Games Initiative was formed. This collective, formed with members representing many major video game publishers, set themselves the task of creating standardised names, descriptions, and developer guidance for a number of accessibility tags that could be applied to video games. This would in theory help developers to better understand which tags should be applied to their games, and help players recognise consistent messaging around what accessibility settings their games would feature.

Nintendo of America is one of the companies involved in the initiative, and in a press release it was stated that “Nintendo of America will be introducing these tags in the future.” 

According to Nintendo: “As publishers opt into adding support for the Accessible Games Initiative tags, players will be able to find them in the My Nintendo Store.”

At present, Nintendo has not yet added accessibility tag information to the Switch 2 Eshop for any of their games, past or present. It also does not appear that any third party developers have done so, likely due to needing Nintendo to push an update to the eshop to be able to present this information on store pages.

This is why I believe now would be the perfect time for Nintendo to introduce accessibility tags to the Eshop, just in advance of the release of their first ever Nintendo published title with a dedicated accessibility menu.

Nintendo, it would be great to see you launch accessibility tags on the Eshop with this strong of a first step. Use the launch of these accessibility tags on the eShop to advertise how accessible your first game with an accessibility menu truly is.

Without playing the finished title it’s a little tricky to be precise, but something I thought might be interesting to do today was to take a look at the Accessible Games Initiative’s developer guidelines for their standardised accessibility tags, and see which tags might apply to Kirby Air Riders, if Nintendo were to implement support for these tags before the game’s November 20th launch.

Chat Speech to Text and Text to Speech – This tag might apply to Kirby Air Riders, but it’s unclear from the AGI’s developer guidance. The game’s only chat support is GameChat, the Switch 2’s built in system level chat option, and that does support these features on a system level. The game itself doesn’t, because it doesn’t have chat of its own. I would love to know if this tag is meant to be applied in this type of specific scenario.

Multiple Volume Controls – Basically just multiple customisable audio sliders for different audio sources. This definately applies.

Stereo Audio – Yep, simple, applies.

Difficulty Levels – CPU strength can be altered, alongside slowing down gameplay. This seems like an easy pick.

Basic and Full Input Remapping – Basic Input Remapping means being able to switch between presets of controls, or remap your buttons only. Full Input Remapping includes the full remapping of buttons as well as non button inputs such as analogue sticks, which seems to apply to this game.

Playable Without Motion Controls – Can confirm that one.

Playable Without Rapid Button Presses – I think this applies from my playtest experience, but I can’t be certain.

Playable Without Touch Controls – another easy win.

Camera Comfort – As seen with the presets for vision accessibility such as motion sickness reduction, this should apply.

Clear Text – Another one that seems pretty applicable.

Colour Alternatives – Colourblind filters aren’t perfect, but they are in this game and they do satisfy the conditions for this tag.

At a glance, not having played the full game, it looks like at least these 12 accessibility tags from the Accessible Games Initiative would apply to Kirby Air Riders. For Nintendo that would make a really strong showing for their first stab at including tags for a game on the eShop.

As these tags are not yet supported on the eShop, there are some questions I’m currently curious about. Perhaps most notably, I would like to see confirmation that these tags will be supported worldwide, and not exclusively on the North American eShop. While that might seem a little foolish for me to be worrying about, the fact that Nintendo of America is specifically being mentioned in official messaging as taking the lead on adding these tags means that I would like to see some official confirmation that the tags will be getting a worldwide rollout.

And look, I know there’s probably logistical reasons it’s not simple to just add the feature this week to the eShop. I’m being a little willfully ignorant of the realities of making this happen. I do understand that there’s probably a dozen different departments discussing at length how and when to roll this feature out, and a bunch of valid reasons probably do exist that justify now not being considered the right time to add this feature to the eShop, I get that.

I just think the stars are aligning for Nintendo in a way that would be a huge missed opportunity not to take advantage of.

Nintendo claims we will see these tags supported by third party developers on the eShop at some point in the future. I assume that is currently waiting for Nintendo to open the floodgates by having these tags on one of their own games before it gets rolled out more widely to third parties.

Obviously it’s not the end of the world if Nintendo doesn’t add accessibility tags to the eShop in the week or so between now and Kirby Air Riders releasing, but if they do manage to launch the feature this week it would go a long way to showing that the publisher recognises the importance of what Sakurai is doing with this title, and the importance of stepping up to learn lessons from this game going forward. 

I think that’s maybe part of the sticking point. If they introduce these tags, maybe they feel like they need to be ready to not embarass themselves by not having many of these tags ticked on future releases. That’s speculation on my part, but I really hope that doesn’t scare them off jumping on the oportunity.