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Six years ago, in January 2020, I posted the first video game accessibility essay on this YouTube channel, talking about aspects of video game accessibility that I wanted to see become standardised in the 12 months ahead. 2020 ended up being a pretty monumental year for video game accessibility, ultimately being the year that kicked off the modern video game accessibility progress wave that we’re still experiencing today.
Every year since then I’ve published a video each January talking about aspects of video game accessibility that I want to see become industry standards, as well as advancements I hope to see, and predictions and questions for the year ahead.
So, let’s waste no more time. Let’s jump into my 2026 video game accessibility predictions and questions.
Will Grand Theft Auto VI Be Accessible?
Grand Theft Auto 5 initially released more than 12 years ago in September 2013, a very different era in video game accessibility.
Read Dead Redemption 2 released in 2018, but was also released before the start of the modern wave of video game accessibility discussions really kicked off.
I have no idea whether GTA VI is going to be any more accessible of a video game than GTA V or Read Dead Redemption 2 were, but as one of this year’s biggest upcoming video game releases, I’m going to have my eyes on it, hoping to see any signs of Rockstar catching up to modern video game accessibility standards that have developed in the past six years.
Will Nintendo Improve on Accessibility?
In late 2025 we saw the release of Kirby Air Riders, a Nintendo published game with a dedicated accessibility menu, and a number of solid accessibility tweaks and options available for disabled players.
While it seems likely that this accessibility push was spearheaded by the game’s director Masahiro Sakurai, it will be interesting to see if, in the year ahead, we notice any similar accessibility improvements start to make their way into other Nintendo first party titles.
Things I’ll be looking out for – Will Nintendo release their own accessibility controller designed for the Switch 2? Will they start to incorporate high contrast mode settings into their first party published titles? Will they add accessibility tags to the Switch 2 eShop?
In particular I’ve got my eyes on two Nintendo published Pokémon titles for potential accessibility opportunities in the year ahead – Pokopia and Pokémon Champions.
Pokopia, seemingly a combination of Pokémon and Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, is being developed by Koei Tecmo’s Omega Force development team, who were responsible for the development of Dragon Quest Builders on the last generation of consoles. The development team has past experience with the genre, and as a non Nintendo studio I wonder whether this may increase the chances that we see accessibility options implemented in this game.
I’m also closely watching for updates on Pokémon Champions, the new turn based competitive Pokémon battle simulator coming to Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, and most interestingly mobile platforms. While little is currently known about this new release, I do wonder whether a turn based battle sim, that doesn’t require walking the player around a 3D environment, and that can be played on mobile, may be more accessible for some players. In particular, mobile platform’s support for screen reader tools has me hopeful that Pokémon Champions on mobile devices may be more accessible for sightless and low vision blind players potentially than it might have been if it was a Switch only release.
One feature currently supported on other consoles but not supported on Switch 2 is Co-Pilot mode / Controller Assist mode, a feature where multiple controllers can be registered at once to a single user. On PlayStation or Xbox this feature allows, for example, players to have a second player assisting controlling a single character, or accessibility setups where a standard and an accessibility controller are used in conjunction with each other for a single game. It would be fantastic for Switch 2 players, for example, to be able to use a Joy-Con in conjunction with their Hori Flex accessibility controller, and have them treated as a single user on a system level.
Lastly, 2025 saw numerous ports of AAA video games such as Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and Star Wars: Outlaws to the Nintendo Switch 2. Will these kinds of ambitious AAA ports continue? If so, they may provide a more accessible way to play these games in variable positions and locations, for disabled players who may need to alter their playing position without advanced notice.
Steam Accessibility Tags Update?
In 2025 I highlighted that Steam, Valve’s PC digital game marketplace, was using accessibility tags that don’t line up with the standardised tags that are being adopted by their competition. In particular, I noted that Steam’s “Playable Without Timed Inputs” tag was being frequently misapplied to games by developers, due to a mismatch between the public facing and developer facing descriptions and understandings of the tag’s meaning and intent.
I would love to see Valve in 2026 update the wording of how their accessibility tags are described to developers, or or update the public facing names of the tags, to bring understanding of some of these tags more in line between developer and player expectations.
Standardised Accessibility Tags
In 2025 we saw the announcement of the Accessible Games Initiative, a collective of numerous video game publishers that formed to create a series of standardised accessibility tag names and definitions, to help standardise language around communicating accessibility information from game developers to disabled players.
At present Xbox have added these new standardised accessibility tags to their digital storefront, with PlayStation and Nintendo expected to follow suit, but not having done so yet.
I hope that in 2026 we see these two console manufacturers update their online stores to reflect these new standardised tags, as well as seeing the list of accessibility tags that have been agreed on by the AGI increase to cover new and more expansive areas of accessibility.
I would also love to see a push for these tags to be made more accessible on physical video game box art in the future.
Subtitles and Text Standards
Text in video games should be able to be set to large sizes for both subtitles and UI / menu text, in addition to supporting opaque backgrounds for contrast, and options for non stylised and sans serif alternative fonts. Subtitles should include support for speaker names, customising text colours per character, and directional indicators to help identify speaker location in a scene.
There are also new standards starting to emerge that I would love to see become increasingly common, such as emotion / tone tag subtitles such as those seen in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The setting, as seen in Assassin’s Creed shadows, added an optional one word description of non verbal tone subtext at the start of subtitles, helping to make it clear the emotion with which a line of dialogue was voice acted.
Games should ideally be offering closed captions rather than simply dialogue subtitles to players. This means ensuring that important non dialogue audio is communicated to players visually, and that licensed music played is at the very least mentioned by name, even if licensing fees may make quoting song lyrics in subtitles difficult.
Subtitles should also be timed to appear on screen in line with when the corresponding line of verbal dialogue is being spoken, so that players with cognitive processing disabilities who use subtitles as supplement to spoken audio are able to follow both at the same time.
For examples of video games that did a great job of supporting larger size text options with the correct kinds of closed caption modifier options in 2025, I would reccomend checking out Assassin’s Creed Shadows or Atomfall.
Accessibility Previews in Menus
Settings options in game menus should ideally be presented alongside an in menu preview of the settings change in action, so that players can see at a glance if a new subtitle size, for example, is going to suit their needs without needing to go back into the game to check, then back to the menu to tweak it some more.
A Multiplatform Accessibility Controller
I would love to see the release of an accessibility controller that could be used across multiple different home consoles, helping to avoid disabled players needing to purchase multiple different expensive accessibility controllers and then go through the effort of switching between different complex setups if they wish to play games across multiple systems.
While I think we’re still a long way from Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation officially coming together to sit down and develop a console agnostic accessibility controller, I would love to see a third party company such as Hori produce an accessibility controller that perhaps features a switch that would allow it to change between modes communicating with different consoles, so that one piece of third party hardware could be used across different platforms.
While it’s fantastic that we live in a world where all three major home video game consoles support at least one accessibility controller option, I still think that there is room for the industry to improve more here.
High Contrast Mode
Initially popularised by PlayStation with the release of The Last of Us: Part 2 back in 2020, High Contrast Mode visuals highlight important interactable elements in games with easy to identify block colours, often also muting backgrounds to a desaturated grey, to make gameplay critical elements easier to see and process.
Over the past six years High Contrast Mode has steadily become far more common industry wide, with most major game publishers now having at least one of their releases feature support for this setting.
2025 saw Ea Sports FC support high contrast mode in online competitive gameplay. While this shouldn’t be a huge deal, multiple online competitive video games that support high contrast mode still limit the feature to being used in offline single player gameplay, as seen with Call of Duty not supporting high contrast outside of story campaigns.
I would love to see high contrast modes in games continue their march toward standardisation in 2026, with a particular desire to see Nintendo start offering the feature in their games, and multiplayer online titles start to be more confident in allowing use of high contrast mode when playing against other ranked online players.
Accessibility Settings Announcements
While we have seen increasing numbers of games released by companies such as PlayStation Studios detailing their accessibility settings ahead of a game’s release, and providing early review copies to accessibility focused critics for pre-launch reviews, accessibility settings reveals are still often being treated by the major video game studios and publishers the same way as other hype building marketing reveals, doled out by PR close to release, long after they’ve been locked in by development teams.
Accessibility settings support is not the same as other gameplay features, and shouldn’t be held back by PR in the same way. Knowing what accessibility settings a game contains determines whether a disabled player is going to be able to play certain kinds of video games, and the earlier that information is known, the sooner a disabled player knows if they should get excited for a game too, or be aware that a game isn’t going to be playable for them.
The video game industry needs to standardise announcing accessibility settings ahead of release, and not holding that information back until the last moment before a game’s on sale.
Accessible Packaging
One of the best things about receiving the Xbox Series X for review a few years back, for me, was seeing the steps that Xbox had taken toward making the console’s packaging more accessible for disabled gamers.
From large stickers on the box that featured an unsealed edge tab for more easy gripping, to a minimising of things like twist ties used inside the box, the thoughtfulness in packaging design went a long way to making the new generation Xbox console more approachable.
In 2023, the PlayStation Access Controller followed a lot of the same accessible packaging standards that had been seen with the Xbox Series packaging and Xbox Adaptive Controller packaging, a great sign that both console makers clearly do understand how accessible packaging is designed, at least in theory.
This kind of accessibility considerate design philosophy is important, and should really be an industry standard. We need to see Xbox and PlayStation start applying these principles outside of the narrow scope of accessibility focused hardware packaging, and Nintendo needs to show an awareness of these packaging principles generally.
Colourblind Filters
I’ve talked on this show a lot about the fact that colourblind filters are a bit of a band aid solution to a problem.
Sticking filters over your game in post to try and make them more accessible to colourblind players can help with some games in a pinch, but typically it’s done in a way that is not really thoughtful about whether a game will be enjoyable to look at for a colourblind player, and that aren’t really thoughtful about precisely how useful they’re going to be.
What I want to see going forward is more game developers testing their game for colourblind accessibility early on, tweaking their core design to be more visually accessible for colourblind players, and having colourblind modes that manually tweak specific colours rather than just applying a one size fits all filter over them.
Controller Remapping
Another quick and overdue suggestion, every video game should at this point be allowing players to customise their controls, and remap which buttons control which functions. We’re thankfully in an age where most video game consoles have system level button remapping, but per game remapping options are still important for cases where a singular game requires its own unique remap to be accessible, or for players whose remapping needs vary on a game by game basis.
Accessibility on First Boot
Another aspect of game design I’ve talked about a lot on this show, that is thankfully becoming more common, we should in a perfect world be expecting video games to make their accessibility settings options easily available to players on the first boot up of a game.
A prior example of this done right was God of War: Ragnarok, which allowed players to either go through a guided accessibility settings walkthrough on first boot, or skip past it to the game’s main menu. Then there was a settings menu, and an accessibility menu, on the main menu screen before getting into any gameplay.
Titles where gameplay starts before you’ve had a chance to set up your settings are thankfully becoming fewer and further between, but this should be an expected standard at this point, and something we expect to become consistent across the industry.
Accessibility Presets
Continuing to discuss God of War: Ragnarok as an example for a moment, another thing that game did amazingly was its implementation of degrees of preset for accessibility settings, tailored to a selection of common categories of disability.
Players could easily set some, or all, available settings that were in game, and likely to be helpful for their category of disability, to be activated with a few button clicks, avoiding a lot of digging through menus manually before getting to start the game.
This kind of thoughtful grouping of settings into degrees of useful presets is the kind of streamlined onboarding that the games industry should aspire to, and something that I hope becomes more standardised in time.
Audio Descriptions
While I generally try and keep this annual list focused on accessibility settings that I feel are either long overdue to become standardised, or are on the precipice of that shift, I want to take some time this year, as I’ve done the last couple of years, to be a bit more optimistic and forward thinking, and suggest that audio descriptions, at the very least for static prerendered cutscenes, should become a standard in the video game industry, and are a feature that is finally starting to gain some momentum thankfully.
In 2026, I’d like to see a AAA studio attempt to implement audio descriptions into not only the cutscenes of their game, but also into gameplay moments to some degree. I recognise that interactive moments in video games are less predictable, and as such they are harder to set up audio description timings for, but given that we know how to use invisible trigger points in games at unavoidable locations to activate conversations between characters, we should in theory be able to use the same sorts of techniques to play audio descriptions during gameplay at points where we know that no other audio is likely to play, and where the player’s location and current actions are a known quantity.
Audio Descriptions are more difficult to incorporate into gameplay in some genres compared to others, but they are starting to become more common in scenes where pacing and on screen information are predictable, and that is a good step on the road to another future industry standard I hope we one day reach.
Sightless Playability
We’ve over the past six years seen a number of high profile AAA game releases, from The Last of Us: Part 2 to Forza Motorsport, making an effort to aim for sightless player playability in genres that developers had for the longest time assumed could not be made sightless player accessible.
Sightless playability is in my opinion one of the most impactful accessibility hurdles that we could be tackling today as an industry, in terms of impact potential. It has the potential to truly mark a moment of growth for our medium in terms of inclusivity, and should be the goalpost we aim to see our industry striving toward.
Audio Descriptions are amazing, but they’re going to need to come alongside navigation tools for sightless players to truly unlock their full potential.
Also, I just want to throw in here, Brok the InvestiGator I found out last year… that is a game that is playable by sightless blind players… the physical release of that game had braille on the box, to have the name of the game tactile in braille, it was properly raised braille.
I would love to see that become more standardised, the idea that if a game is going to be playable by sightless blind players, that the physical edition be identifiable via braille so that if someone has a physical game collection they know which game they;re getting out of their collection.
Little touches like this I think would be really wonderful to see not just as standalone one off examples.
And there we have it – 2026. We’ve got a big year ahead of us, and I’m sure there’s going to be a whole lot of accessibility developments that I haven’t talked about here or that I haven’t forseen, but right now at the start of the year a lot of these are the same things I’ve been banging the drum about for a while, but I would love to see some of these new things start to come to light in the months ahead.
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