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2025 is drawing to a close, and with it my 6th year of covering accessibility in the video game industry. The year’s not quite over, but I’m going to try and take a few weeks off at the end of the year to rest and spend some time with friends, so we’re getting started on end of the year content now to make sure I can actually have a winter break.
2025 has ultimately been a really interesting year for video game accessibility. We’ve had perhaps fewer big “moments” pushing accessibility forward in games in flashy ways, but we have seen a lot of steps forward that either push us promisingly toward standardisation within the industry, or that mark moments of notable growth from studios and publishers that we’ve often been pretty critical of in our end of year wrap up coverage previously.
2025 isn’t a year that’s going to stand out necessarily for big dramatic leaps forward for accessibility, but instead for small and meaningful steps that I think will set the groundwork for future development in the space to be more structured and sustainable.
As always this is not an exhaustive list of EVERY SINGLE accessibility moment in the video game industry in 2025 (even as a curated list this video is longer than I intended it to be. I’m recording this when I’ve finished writting it and OOF it got long). If there’s any notable moments in gaming accessibility in 2025 that you think deserved a spot on this list that I missed, I would encourage you to share it in the comments.
So, no more stalling, let’s get into talking about the past year in video game accessibility.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (Late 2024)
Because I don’t create these end of year recaps precisely on the last day of each calendar year, there’s always going to be a little bit of overlap with the end of the previous year. Also, I’ll give the caveat up front that I did some uncredited work as a mock reviewer for this game while it was in development. I do consultancy and mock review work on a bunch of titles when not making public facing content online, so expect a fair number of disclaimers like this throughout my end of year recap.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle feels worth discussing in this end of year recap as it really was the first in a year of notable accessibility improvements across Bethesda’s published suite of studios.
The game featured customisable subtitles, captioning for important sound effects, visuals for incoming attack audio, customisable controls, a configurable high contrast mode (colour alteration, opacity options, colour fill vs outline, outline thickness etc), separate granular customisation of action and puzzle difficulty, auto parry, camera hints for puzzles, and stealth options which could allow you to essentially skip most combat in the game.
The Byowave Proteus Controller Review
The Byowave Proteus Controller released in 2024, kind of. When in 2024 is a little bit of a messy question. It was available to purchase at Gamescom in August 2024, but those units featured a hardware bug that necessitated either refunding or sending replacement hardware to those who purchased those early units. The hardware’s full release was in December 2024, with many like myself posting our reviews of the hardware in early 2025.
A controller made of a series of modular cubes and swappable face plates, I do believe there are some really compelling use cases for the Proteus as an accessibility controller. Its modular nature means that it can be reconfigured to fit a lot of varied use cases, and I’m very glad that I have one in my collection of accessibility tools.
It’s definitely pricey, and the tech had some early teething issues such as signal connection strength that were hard to square away with its premium price point, but having had time to sort those issues out I’m pretty happy to own a Proteus controller at the end of 2025.
IRIS plugin for Unreal
Originally revealed in December 2023, IRIS is an open source tool created by EA which can be used by game developers to test for likely photosensitivity risks in media. It allows game developers to feed gameplay footage into a piece of software, and see where spikes in photosensitivity risk might exist within a game.
In early 2025 a version of IRIS was released as a real-time Unreal Engine plugin, allowing for developers who were using Unreal as their engine of choice to detect potential photosensitivity risks in real time within their game engine, rather than having to record footage to separately feed into the tool.
Switch 2 First Looks Suggest Accessibility Potential
While some design leaks for the Switch 2 had been floating around online since September 2024, the dam burst in early 2025 when peripheral manufacturer Genki showcased a 3D printed model of the Switch 2 at their booth at CES.
This detailed look at a near final version of the console, followed up hastily by a reveal teaser by Nintendo, gave us our first look at the upcoming console’s unique features, and their accessibility potential.
It seemed like the new Joy-Cons, which would attach magnetically to the console, could be turned on their side and used like an Optical Mouse on PC. Furthermore, the addition of a USB-C port on the top of the system suggested disabled players may be able to use the Hori Flex accessibility controller with the console when in Tabletop Mode, something not supported on the base Switch due to it only featuring a USB-C on its lower side.
Able to Play – Personalised Accessibility Ratings for Video Games
Revealed to the world in early March, Able to Play is part video game accessibility database, part personalised recommendations tool.
The idea of the website is you can select a number of accessibility tags, and how much they should be weighed into your gaming experience, ranging from “nice to have” upto “a deal breaker if not present”. Your account is then compared to the tags present on a database of video games, offering personalised recommendations and numerical score values for how accessible a particular video game might be for you.
Now obviously a numerical score is never going to perfectly encapsulate the nuances of accessibility. A game might technically have a feature that you need but not to a high enough level of support, or a game might lack a feature that you typically need but in this particular genre you’ll kind of be able to work around it. The site’s algorithm isn’t perfect, but it does a pretty decent job of at a glance helping to identify games that might be unexpectedly accessible or inaccessible. In particular, the ability to see games without must have features rated as a 0/100 automatically can be a really useful shorthand if you’re trying to quickly see if something might be a good fit for you without reading more in depth accessibility reviews.
Art of Fauna
Art of Fauna is a mobile puzzle game released in early 2025 where players assemble puzzles either by assembling fragments of images of animals in nature, or by reassembling passages of text to learn more about the creatures featured in the artwork.
The game features a simplified language toggle and multiple font options, customisable colour schemes, content filters to hide images of potentially phobia triggering animal categories, as well as iOS screen reader and Switch control (meaning the game is playable by sightless blind players, or those needing to play using an external button rather than a touch interface.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows Includes “Emotion Subtitles”
Released in March 2025, Assassin’s Creed Shadows features a number of really impressive accessibility features, but was perhaps most notable in my eyes for its inclusion of a feature called “Emotion Subtitles”.
The idea is simple: before each line of dialogue, this setting adds a one word descriptor to subtitles (similar to speaker name tags), explaining the non verbal tone delivery of that spoken dialogue line.
While this feature is first and foremost going to be useful for deaf players who may not be able to hear the intonation of the line of dialogue, it’s also really useful for autistic players like myself who may struggle to intuitively recognise the non verbal subtext in how words are spoken out loud.
I’ve spent years advocating for the idea that these types of non verbal subtext subtitles should be offered in video games, and 2025 really was a great year for seeing that feature starting to make its way into a number of high profile video game releases. I made videos about wanting to see this feature back in 2020 when I first started this series, and it’s been wonderful to finally have some good examples of it being done well to point future developers toward.
The game also features audio described cutscenes for partially sighted blind players, which describe non verbal subtextual actions such as a character rolling their eyes in frustration, which are also coincidently useful for autistic players for similar reasons.
The game also features numerous customisation options for gameplay difficulty tweaking, motor control accessibility alteration, and fairly robust high contrast mode support.
In terms of big budget video game releases, Assassin’s Creed Shadows was undeniably one of the most exciting titles this year in terms of accessibility.
The Accessible Games Initiative Standardises Accessibility Tags
Announced live on stage at the GDC game developers conference, the Accessible Games Initiative is a collective made up of members of multiple major video game publishers including EA, Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Ubisoft.
Over the past few years we’ve seen multiple video game publishers including PlayStation and Xbox add accessibility tags to their online digital game storefronts, to help disabled players at a glance see what accessibility features a given game supports. These tags however differed in naming conventions and requirement metrics from console to console.
As a collective group, the members of the AGI came together to create a list of 24 accessibility tags with standardised names, definitions, and developer guidance. The idea being that by standardising these aspects players would be able to better understand what support a tag offered, and developers could more clearly know if they should or should not apply a tag to their games.
While not perfect or fully exhaustive, this list does a lot to help standardise language around common accessibility criteria. It has already been adopted by Xbox on their digital storefront, with PlayStation and Nintendo expected to adopt these tags in the future.
If nothing else, seeing multiple major video game publishers come together to agree on aspects of accessibility design and methodology despite their businesses being in financial competition felt like a really impactful step forward for accessibility within our industry, and I look forward to seeing where the initiative is ultimately heading.
The Xbox Adaptive Joystick
Revealed at Gamescom 2024 and released to the public in 2025, the Xbox Adaptive Joystick is a wired controller, shaped kind of like a Wii Nunchuck, featuring an analogue stick, bumper and trigger buttons, and four face buttons. In essence, it’s roughly half the buttons found on a standard Xbox controller.
The idea of the controller is to be an affordable, mass produced one handed controller that can be used stand alone for games that feature limited mandatory button inputs, or as part of a larger accessibility setup when paired with something like the Xbox Adaptive Controller.
As someone who really appreciates being able to have my hands resting in more comfortable or varied positions when gaming, I’ve found it really nice to be able to play with a pair of Xbox Adaptive Joysticks plugged into an Xbox Adaptive Controller on my lap, giving me freedom to reposition my hands more comfortable during play.
The controllers don’t feature Start or Select buttons, or an Xbox home button, which isn’t ideal if you’re using them separately from an Xbox Adaptive Controller. The controllers however do however make it a lot easier for many disabled players to set up an accessibility setup that’s comfortable, reducing the need to hold a standard full size Xbox controller one handed while playing in specific setups.
Additionally, the controller’s lower price at less than £30 is particularly notable given the usually high price of accessibility peripherals. For disabled players used to paying a premium for controllers, the price of these is a really important factor in the story of their release.
I’ve ultimately found two of these plugged into an Xbox Adaptive Controller a more reliable split handed control option for me in most cases than the Byowave Proteus Controller, which I didn’t expect to be the case.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Mobile
Often when console games are ported to mobile some of their features get lost in the porting process, but Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown truly feels like it made no compromises in that transition, and gained some new features along the way.
One of my top picks for most accessible video games of 2024, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown released on mobile devices in 2025 and features the original’s high contrast mode support, highly customisable difficulty tweaking options, and ability to pin screenshots to the map, hugely useful for players like myself with aphantasia or memory related disabilities.
The mobile port also features multiple forms of on screen control customisation, the ability to automate specific features such as parrying or the use of healing items, a game speed reduction setting, and setup presets for styles of play that take into account the limitations of mobile as a platform.
Atomfall Supporting HUGE Text (and Tone Tags)
Released in March 2025, Atomfall is a first person open world adventure game set in England, in the aftermath of a nuclear radiation disaster. The game features a number of really cool accessibility features, but I’m going to focus on two of them here, the game’s text size and tone tag support.
As someone that works as an accessibility consultant, a big piece of advice I give to developers is that if they’re unsure what text sizes to offer players, find the biggest text size you think you’d expect to be useful to players, and then offer a few sizes larger than that. Even if it doesn’t look terribly aesthetically pleasing, the players who need text to be what you might consider excessively large will appreciate the option to go that large more than they’ll dislike its aesthetics.
If text in a game can’t be made large enough to be accessible for someone, that player isn’t going to really care that it looks nice at smaller sizes but isn’t accessible.
Atomfall allows its text to be increased to 52pt size, large enough that it sometimes breaks the UI of the game a little. I think that’s fantastic. This really is the gold standard of what I mean when I tell developers not to be afraid of offering truly huge text size options.
Additionally, Atomfall features the ability to see a one word description of non verbal subtext tone next to player selectable dialogue choices, helping players to be clear on how to interpret what their character is about to say to an NPC, and particularly useful for autistic players who may struggle more than others with inferring that tone from just the text presented.
Godot Game Development Engine Improves Accessibility
Godot is a game development engine which saw a surge of popularity and use following competing development tool Unity making sweeping unpopular changes to their developer payments structure.
In Godot version 4.5, released in April 2025, made a number of changes that made it easier for developers to integrate accessibility features into their games.
The team behind Godot integrated AccessKit into their engine, a tool that basically acts as a translation layer between system level tools and games themselves. The addition of AccessKit to Godot made it easier for games made in this engine to for example connect their UI elements to screen reader software, as well as creating hooks for offering support for features like high contrast mode in games.
Content Warnings in Lost Records Bloom and Rage
Lost Records: Bloom and Rage is an episodic adventure game released in two parts, half in February and half in April 2025. The game focused on the stories of a number of women who shared a supernatural summer together in the mid 90’s, before meeting back up under mysterious circumstances decades later.
Developed by DontNod, a studio known for their robust approach to content warnings in games like Tell me Why, Lost Records stands out for offering content warnings when the game first boots up, but also offering more detailed content warnings online, accessible via a QR code in the game, for players who are okay being spoiled on game content in order to not be caught off guard by potentially triggering content.
Date Everything Content Warnings Integration.
Another game released in 2025 with notably interesting content warning integration, visual novel dating sim Date Everything introduces content warnings via an in game conversation with a non judgemental character. The game gives the player the option to turn on or off content warnings, and doesn’t penalise the player or lock them out of any content if they choose to skip interacting with characters due to content warnings given.
Chroma Colourblind Simulator
Over the past few years I’ve talked on this show about EA’s Patent Pledge, and their moves as a publisher to release internally developed accessibility tools as open source for other studios to benefit from. This year Ubisoft took a similar approach and made one of their own tools available for other studios to use.
Chroma is a tool that, in real time, simulates different forms of colourblindness. The idea is that on a multiple monitor setup for example a developer might have their game open on their main screen, and a window in a second monitor showing what their game looks like for a player with a specific form of colourblindness. They could alternatively have half of their main screen show the colourblind player perspective, and have the other half unaffected.
The tool is basically designed to help game developers in real time identify potential problem areas of their visual design, and potentially tweak them early in development, rather than trying to rely on overlay filters to fix playability later on in development.
I’m a huge fan of companies making these kinds of tools accessible and open source. I hope to see this improve rates of colourblind conscious design in future game releases.
Switch 2 Reveal Direct Launches Alongside Accessibility Features Website
In early April 2025 the Nintendo Switch 2 was finally formally revealed to the world in a nearly 1 hour long Nintendo Direct. While a lot of the promised features sounded interesting, what stood out to me most on that day was Nintendo’s approach to communicating accessibility information ahead of the console’s launch.
The same day as the reveal Direct, Nintendo uploaded a dedicated page to their website detailing and showcasing some of their new console’s software level accessibility features, including showcasing videos of many of the features in action.
These features included text to speech menu narration, returning features such as screen magnification, and new options such as voice to text transcription in voice chat.
While the execution of some of these features would be less than idea when the system released a few months later, the fact that this information was communicated at the same time as other marketing reveals for the console felt like a significant step forward for Nintendo, a company who have previously been very hesitant to talk about accessibility in their game’s marketting directly.
PS5 Audio Boost
PS5 Audio Boost is a system level feature where players can tweak the audio balance of all sounds on their PS5 console. Players who struggle with hearing high or low frequencies for example can boost these system wide in their audio mix, and players with one sided hearing loss can tailor these frequency range audio boosts independently per ear, helping to create a more balanced audio profile.
The part of this update that personally interested me was Voice Boost, a feature which increases the system wide volume of centre mixed or medium range audio, typically where voices are balanced in audio mixing. While not directly targeting voice audio, the end result is functionally a dialogue volume boost in a high percentage of software.
As an autistic player I often struggle with picking out dialogue from audio mixing, due to not being able to mentally tune out other noises that I’m not meant to be focusing on. In games that don’t feature the ability to customise audio to increase dialogue in the mix, this feature has been game changing for me.
It’s a shame it’s only supported when playing audio through headphones plugged directly into a controller, but there are times this feature has been invaluable to my ability to enjoy a game.
Steam Adds Its Own (Not Standardised) Accessibility Tags
Announced in April 2025, a couple of months after the Accessible Games Initiative revealed their standardised accessibility tags at GDC, Valve announced that their PC digital game storefront Steam would also be receiving support for accessibility tags in 2025, allowing PC gamers purchasing through Steam the ability to see at a glance if a game featured accessibility tags that might be important for their experience as a player.
Notably, these tags were not the same tags proposed by the Accessible Games Initiative. Valve had created their own set of tags, with their own custom explanations and developer guidance.
While not ideal that these tags were not standardised to match up with those of the Accessible Games Initiative, broadly this was a positive step forward. One more digital storefront featured support for accessibility tags, with Nintendo at this point the only major holdout in this regard.
These tags are not perfect, the “playable without timed inputs” tag in particular has been applied to multiple games this year that I feel it shouldn’t be applied to, due to some confusing messaging discrepancies created by Valve. However, on the whole they’ve been a very positive development and step forward for the industry.
To a T is a Disability Representation Mixed Bag
I wanted to love To a T, I really did. At many points it was a truly wonderful experience, despite some issues.
Developed by the original creator of the Katamari Damacy series, in collaboration with AbleGamers, To a T is a short narrative adventure game about Teen, a 13 year old whose arms are permanently stuck out to the sides of their body.
The game is a pretty clear and direct allegory for the lived experiences of people with physical disabilities, and despite the cartoonish way it’s presented, there is a lot to love about this game’s representation of living life as a person with a disability.
Teen lives in a home that features accessibility accommodations. They own a long handled spoon they can use to feed themselves cereal in the morning rather than having to rely on help from their mother to feed themselves. They have a specially adapted sink to make washing their face easier. They have a medical support dog who helps them to get dressed, and the game doesn’t shy away from areas of their life where they struggle to find independence, such as going to the bathroom without assistance.
The game also does a great job in my opinion of showcasing the ways that loss of a support animal can lead to loss of independence for a disabled individual, and the struggles emotionally that can bring. During a portion of the game Teen is looking for their missing dog in the rain and does so in their pajamas, the implication being they’ve resisted help from their mother to get changed, due to the regression in autonomy and independence this would represent for them.
The game’s story of loving yourself as you are with a disability is on the whole a pretty positive story to share, in my eyes mostly let down by playing into the “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” school of disability allegory.
To make things simple, Teen’s disability turns out to be a literal superpower, the very real ability to spin in a circle and fly. Teen gets bullied for being disabled, but this stops when their disability superpower is shown to be useful and beneficial to the bullies. Your path to being accepted as a disabled person is to prove that your disability is beneficial to others around you.
I am glad the game exists, even if I wouldn’t recommend it as a way to teach non disabled children about disabilities without an accompanying conversation about some of these aspects of the game with the child.
South of Midnight
Here’s another game that I need to caveat, I did uncredited mock review work on this game at some point in its development. I don’t think that impacts my ability to assess its accessibility, but it’s important context to provide up front.
South of Midnight is a linear puzzle platforming adventure game about Hazel, a young woman who travels to a Wonderland-esque folklore world in the hopes of rescuing her mother, washed away in a devastating flood.
One of South of Midnight’s most interesting accessibility features is a navigation line that can help players identify the path toward game progression. This line can be customised in terms of how long it remains visible, how far it stretches away from the player, whether the camera shifts to follow the line, and whether it includes an audio beacon of custom length and pitch.
The game features a highly stylised stop motion effect on in game visuals, which can be disabled for players who find it triggers motion sickness (unfortunately you can’t disable it in cutscenes, only during gameplay).
Menu text and HUD elements can be scaled to very large sizes, players can activate menu narration, subtitles feature directional indications and important audio captions, button holds cab be shortened or turned into toggles, auto lock on can be set for enemies, chase sequences can be skipped, as cab boss fights, regular combat encounters etc.
Lastly, the game featured numerous difficulty altering options, including full player invincibility.
Doom: The Dark Ages
We started this recap talking about Indiana Jones and The Golden Circle, a Bethesda published title with impressive accessibility options. Doom: The Dark Ages also impressed this year with its accessibility support, helping Bethesda specifically shine as a publisher making accessibility efforts.
The game is one of the first Xbox studios titles I’ve seen offer a robust accessibility onboarding setup on first boot, which was exciting in and of itself. From there the game features its own dedicated accessibility settings menu on the main menu, and mirrors many of its settings in other submenus for users who might be put off finding them under an accessibility heading.
Many gameplay features can be automated such as sprinting and weapon switching, weapon bobbing animations can be removed to reduce motion sickness, Parry indicators can be recoloured, shield throwing attacks can auto track to enemies, the game offers highly customisable high contrast mode support, screen shake can be disabled, there’s pretty decent font and HUD scaling, incoming attacks can be set to have unique indicators, parry windows can be increased, gun targeting can be made more forgiving, attacks can be set to stagger enemies more easily, player and enemy damage can be altered, enemy aggression can be tweaked, game speed can be lowered down to 50%, enemy projectiles can be slowed down, resource pickups can be made more numerically rewarding, your field of view can be increased, and combat sound effects can be visualised.
Gosh, I barely scratched the surface. This game did some really impressive stuff in terms of accessibility that caught a lot of people off guard. It’s a big step forward for the series.
F1 2025
Forza Motorsport, released in late 2023, made huge strides forward for accessibility in the technical sim racing genre with its introduction of blind driving assist features, designed to allow sightless blind players to play the game based on audio cues and associated assist features.
F1 2025, released by EA this summer, spiritually took that torch and ran with it, bringing much of the same sorts of accessibility support seen in Forza Motorsport and applying it to their similarly technical sim focused racing title.
Their implementation of Blind driving Assist features includes audio cues to tell the player when control is being taken away from them and returned to them (such as when entering the pit), audio to indicate the strength of break that a turn will require, audio cues for gear shifting and current gear, audio that pans to help identify the direction of the ideal racing line, audio when the player approaches the edges of the track, audio cues for the direction and intensity of upcoming turns, and wrong way indicator audio.
Beyond that, F1 2025 offers players visual comfort settings to reduce motion sickness or remove distracting visual elements such as the steering wheel animation, a Tinnitus sound reduction filter, steering assists, customisable difficulty options, the ability to rewind races in single player content to redo difficult sections, and more.
I’m really glad to see that Forza Motorsport’s specific brand of accessibility is being noticed by other titles in the technical sim racing genre.
Nintendo Switch 2 Releases
We can keep this one nice and brief, the Nintendo Switch 2 released in early June 2025. We knew a decent amount about its accessibility in advance of launch thanks to pre-release messaging from Nintendo, but launch day did reveal a few unexpected positive and negative aspects.
While the Switch 2 does feature screen reader support for system level menu navigation, it can’t be activated until a player has gone through the console’s initial onboarding flow, and had help navigating to its location in the system settings. It also doesn’t work in the eShop disappointingly.
One positive found was that the system’s built-in voice chat, which supports voice to text automated transcription, not only was decently high quality but also successfully displayed spoken swear words as text, and did not as default censor them. This might seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many speech to text systems by default censor swearing, such as for example YouTube’s automated captions. This is not only infantalising to disabled people, but actively shuts them out of fully understanding conversations that would have been accessible to those able to hear, creating an inequitable experience. We shouldn’t have had to worry about it, but given it was Nintendo this was a pleasant surprise.
NaNoMon
NaNoMon is a desktop virtual pet that you can train, then battle against your friends virtual pets. I mainly bring this up to say I was credited as an accessibility playtester on this game, and that’s pretty cool. I helped with cognitive and motor accessibility feedback on a number of different minigames.
Wordatro
Another one that’s a little self promo, Wordatro is a scrabble inspired roguelite where players select powerups to boost their word scoring potential, then spell words that activate those power ups to keep up with increasing point score thresholds.
This is another title that I’m credited as an accessibility consultant, having given feedback on aspects such as the necessity to offer a way to disable the game’s animated background, and cognitive accessibility feedback on how the game tutorialises and explains its mechanics to the player.
Peak’s Ongoing Accessibility Updates
No discussion of accessibility in 2025 would be complete without discussing Peak, the cooperative social mountain climbing game from Landfall Games and AggroCrab.
Peak’s significance in 2025 accessibility discussions is less to do with its release day, and more to do with its journey post launch. In countless post launch updates the game has been updated to address accessibility feedback from the community, not just adding new features but refining their execution. A great example, the developers added an arachnophobia mode in one update, then in a later series of updates tweaked its execution to account for aspects that were still issues for some players.
The team at AggroCrab have also done a great job sneaking accessibility updates into their broader marketing videos post launch, making accessibility update conversations humorous and normalised.
Steam Deck Accessibility Update
As part of a mid June System Firmware update, Valve brought a bunch of really appreciated accessibility features to the Steam Deck (and any future Steam OS devices that are upcoming presumably, like the 2026 Steam Machine).
The update added a dedicated accessibility menu, a UI scaling slider, high contrast support for the OS, a toggle to reduce motion when navigating the system menus, system level screen reader support (with custom volume, pitch, and speed), and menu colour filters which could greyscale or invert screen colours for increased visibility.
Bridge Command
I’m not going to go into huge depth on this one as it’s pretty region specific and you might debate how much of a video game it is, but in 2025 I started visiting Bridge Command, a London based interactive theatre / LARP / Video game sci-fi experience. Visitors select a mission category (Exploration, Diplomacy, Intrigue, or Military), before boarding one of two full size starship bridge sets and spending 90+ minutes completing a mission as a multiple person crew in space.
The event, which involves interacting with actors and creative decision making, also functions very much as a cooperative video game, with players assigned roles aboard their starship, with touch screens controlling elements such as flying the ship, controlling heat and power management, piloting drones, or scanning approaching vessels.
Bridge Command launched prior to 2025, but this is the year I started visiting, and I want to talk a little bit about what I think they do right when it comes to accessibility.
Bridge Command’s staff have, in my experience, been highly responsive to accessibility feedback received, and quick to integrate solutions. One example I wish to highlight, one of their time limited halloween missions this year involved whispering. When it was highlighted the challenge that this might pose compared to normal missions for players with partial hearing loss, I was impressed that by the following day they had incorporated a fix into the event, managing to find out if anyone playing the mission was likely to be impacted without spoiling the specifics of the mission, and adapting the mission to raise the speaking volume earlier if that was going to be an access barrier for players.
Bridge Command has really taken over my life a bit this year, and I want to take a momentt to highlight how much I appreciate their responsiveness to accessibility feedback.
EA Sports FC 26 Reveals High Contrast Support
Look, I have problems with EA Sports FC (previously Fifa) in terms of accessibility. Fifa Ultimate Team packs are one of the worst examples out there of predatory microtransaction practices that disproportionately harm disabled players for example. It takes a lot for me to make time to praise this series.
That said, this year I had to acknowledge that EA Sports FC 2026 did something pretty impressive.
I’m likely going to gloss over some of that this game achieved this year in terms of accessibility, but I want to highlight that FC 26 revealed, in one of its earliest reveal trailers, the presence of high contrast mode support, a first for the series.
It was notable to see this support added to the series and advertised long in advance of release to a general focus audience, but it was perhaps more impactful that the game’s high contrast mode support is available to players even when playing online in ranked multiplayer gameplay.
This shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is.
Game developers, on the whole, have been really cautious about allowing high contrast mode support to be used in online multiplayer titles. 2024’s short lived hero shooter Concord featured support for high contrast character outlines, but Call of Duty by comparison only allows high contrast mode to be used in single player campaigns, not online multiplayer matchmaking.
Seeing high contrast mode supported in online competitive gameplay is still a rarity in the video game industry. EA Sports FC 26 supporting that as an option really was a significant moment of progress.
Drag X Drive
Released in August, Drag X Drive was a highly unusual release for Nintendo. The game is basically wheelchair basketball, and to its credit it plays very much how you might intuitively expect based on that pitch. The game was designed as a showcase for the Switch 2’s mouse controls and is played by using two Joy-Cons to simulate pushing wheelchair wheels forward and back to move or turn, and using a throwing motion to throw the ball.
While it was nice to see this game exist as a fairly mechanically faithful recreation of a sport that’s mostly played by disabled players, at the end of the day the game’s lack of an accessible alternative control scheme felt at odds with the game’s otherwise disability aware aesthetic.
Roblox Text Scaling
I’m going to get this out the way – Roblox is bad, don’t let your kids play it if you can help it. It’s a mess, it has a lot of issues with kids being able to access inappropriate content or communicate with bad actors, and I would really caution parents against letting their kids play it unsupervised.
But, with that out the way, let’s talk about something notably positive that happened with Roblox this year.
Roblox is, for the uninitiated, a sandbox for user generated content. It’s not one game so much as it is an unfathomably huge number of user generated games mushed together. As such, generally speaking, accessibility support in Roblox is often on a case by case basis.
That’s why it’s so impressive that the team behind Roblox were this year able to introduce an update that added text scaling functionality that functions for every single game on the platform, without game creators needing to enable its support.
Given the mess that is Roblox, the idea that accessibility could be backported into millions of games on the platform at once is significant.
Again, I’m not recommending you play Roblox though.
Squeakross
Yet another disclosure, this is the first video game my wife is credited as an accessibility consultant on. I think it’s a notable and important game, but I’ll admit to my bias here.
Squeakross is a nonogram puzzle game, a genre familiar to players of Picross. Players use numbers listed around a grid to draw a picture, based on knowing how many dots in a row or column need to be filled in before a gap exists, but without specifying where those dots or gaps fit outside of their relation to each other.
The developers of Squeakross put a lot of effort into making the game as accessible as possible for players with Dyscalculia, essentially the numerical equivalent of Dyslexia. The game features a huge number of settings and design elements, all active by default, designed to help players who struggle holding numbers in their head to accessibly engage with these puzzles, catch their errors, and not feel stressed or judged while engaging with the core puzzle’s numeracy mechanics.
Also, the game allows your custom character mouse to have visible limb differences and other aspects of disability present in their design, which is super cute.
Dyscalculia is so rarely considered in accessibility conversations, and I’m really glad that Squeakross made a strong stab at pushing things forward in this area.
Wildwood Down
Wildwood Down is a game that only recently came onto my radar, but that I really hope to get more people aware of.
Released back in August, Wildwood Down is a point and click adventure game where the protagonist has Downs Syndrome. Written in consultation with and performed by a person with Downs Syndrome, the game is a murder mystery where you’re tasked with finding out who killed your best friend at Spring Break, and where your missing sister has disappeared to.
The game’s writing does a great job of balancing the opportunities and barriers presented to a person with Downs Syndrome in trying to solve this case, and is a title well worth checking out if it’s not on your radar.
Ghost of Yotei
Unsurprisingly, PlayStation’s big AAA first party new release in 2025 kept up the publisher’s reliable track record of pretty darn accessible video game releases.
The game features highly customisable gameplay difficulty, combat assists such as enemy lock-on, wind gust visuals to lead the player to progression locations, options to disable motion control minigames, and most of the other standard features common in PlayStation published titles.
Unfortunately the game doesn’t support High Contrast mode, which is a rarity for a PlayStation published title. At launch touch pad inputs were mandatory to complete the game, but this has been tweaked in a post release update.
Abiotic Factor 1.0 Gameplay Customisation
For full disclosure here, I gave some informal accessibility feedback to this game’s developers back at Gamescom a number of years ago, I’m going to guess August 2023. Nothing formal was done as a consultant, but I’m being transparent none the less.
After a lengthy period in early access, sci-fi survival exploration title Abiotic Factor had its 1.0 release in the summer of 2025.
What made this game notable from an accessibility perspective was the sheer degree of customisation options available to players. The game allowed basically any gameplay element that might be inaccessible to be disabled entirely, regardless of how much it might impact the developer intended gameplay experience.
Players can turn off item inventing minigames, make it so that items are not dropped on death to then need to be recovered, you can reduce the durability rate of weapons and gear, impact the rate that your physical needs have to be cared for, and a whole bunch more.
In terms of games allowing entire mechanics to be skipped to make the game more accessible, Abiotic Factor is unparalleled this year.
Kirby Air Riders Accessibility
In October 2025, the Nintendo published racing game Kirby Air Riders got its second dedicated hour long Nintendo Direct presentation. Expectations were pretty low, but in a rather unexpected move several minutes of the Direct were dedicated to game director Masahiro Sakurai revealing the game’s dedicated accessibility menu, and detailing many of its features.
This was a huge moment for Nintendo, a company historically lagging behind the competition on accessibility messaging. Granted, it seems likely this push for accessibility in the title was probably a result of Sakurai experiencing personal need for accessibility support, and this is likely for now Sakurai specific and not a wider Nintendo initiative, but the moment is still significant.
The game released in November featured an accessibility menu (which when selected shows Kirby characters excited about accessibility icons), presets for motion sickness and visibility accessibility, a large number of highly detailed customisable settings, and support for one handed play.
At this point it’s unclear if this will spark wider improvements in accessibility for other Nintendo titles, but one can hope. Regardless, this is another accessibility win for Nintendo in 2025, and that is something to celebrate. I don’t remember the last year where Nintendo was this present in end of the year accessibility conversations.
An Unplayable Game
Released in October 2025, An Unplayable Game is a short 15 minute experience (45 minutes if you explore the director’s commentary), designed to help non disabled players understand the frustration of an inaccessible video game, and how accessibility settings are about making an unplayable game into a playable one, not necessarily about making it an “easy” experience.
I don’t want to spoil too much about it, but given its short runtime it’s one of the most effective ways I’ve seen motor control accessibility barriers in video games spiritually captured, if not one to one emulated, in a way that conveys the heart of what accessibility is here to achieve.
Hades 2 Blind Accessibility Mod
Released in early November 2025, the Hades 2 Blind Player Accessibility Mod adds a bunch of really useful features to Hades 2 that increase the range of people who can play one of 2025’s most engaging roguelite experiences.
While not necessarily designed to make the game playable for sightless blind players without assistance, the tools provided by the mod go a long way to improve playability for low vision players by offering things like improved screen reader support, and the ability to teleport between points of interest.
The Byowave Proteus Builder
Revealed in November 2025, the Proteus Builder is a cheaper version of the Proteus Controller. It features fewer of the modular cubes in its packaging, but instead includes a mouse style one handed grip, allowing for a higher number of buttons to be accessed one handed.
I’ve yet to get my hands on the Proteus Builder, but I’m hoping to put a review together in early 2026. It’s an interesting accessibility tool, and I’m always excited to see more accessible hardware form factors and designs being added to the industry.
Star Wars Outlaws Post Release Accessibility Updates
Originally released in August 2024, Star Wars Outlaws was a fairly accessible video game from day one, supporting features such as high contrast mode visuals and audio described cutscenes.
However, the reason I’m giving it space in the 2025 year end wrap up is to recognise that, in the more than a year since the game originally released, the development team have been continuously updating their accessibility support with every major numbered patch update.
The best time to make your game accessible is launch day, but the best alternative is regularly updating post release as barriers and solutions become apparent.
Okay, that was a long one. Gosh, this is going to be a nightmare to edit. I apologise in advance Jane, this is the longest Access-Ability episode I’ve ever sent your way. Apparently I had a LOT I wanted to write about this year.
Thank you so much everyone who’s watched the video to this point, whether you’re a regular viewer of this series or an occasional delver.
I’m going to get out of here before I give Jane even more to have to edit.
Have a wonderful end of year everyone. I will see you with new accessibility thoughts in 2026.
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