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The Verge
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
The Access-Ability Summer Showcase returns with the latest in accessible games
Now in its third year, the Access-Ability Summer Showcase is back to redress the lack of meaningful accessibility information across the ongoing video game showcase season. As we see progress broadly slow down, it's also a timely reminder of the good work that's still happening in pursuit of greater accessibility in gaming. 'At a time where we are seeing a slowdown in accessibility adoption in the AAA games space,' organizer Laura Kate Dale says, 'we're showing that there are interesting accessible games being made, games with unique and interesting features, and that being accessible is something that can bring an additional audience to purchase and play your games.' The showcase is growing, too. In 2025, it's longer, more packed with games, and streamed concurrently on Twitch, Youtube (where it's also available on-demand), and on Steam's front page. That growth comes with its own challenges — mitigated this year by Many Cats Studio stepping in as sponsor — but the AA Summer Showcase provides an accessible platform in response to the eye-watering costs of showcasing elsewhere (it has previously been reported that presenting trailers across Summer Game Fest starts at $250,000), while providing disabled viewers with the information they need to know if they can actually get excited about new and upcoming releases. It's lesson Dale hopes other platforms might take on board. 'I grow the show in the hopes that other showcases copy what we're doing and make this the norm,' she says. 'If I could quit hosting the AA Summer Showcase next year because every other show in June committed to talking about accessibility as part of their announcements, that would be wonderful news.' To help that along (sorry, Laura, don't quit just yet), The Verge has collated the games featured in this year's Access-Ability Summer Showcase below. Visual accessibility in focus A major theme that emerged from this year's showcase is color blind considerations. The showcase kicked off with ChromaGun2: Dye Hard by Pixel Maniacs, a first-person color-based puzzler. In its color blind mode, colors are paired with symbols for better parsing and those symbols combine when colors are mixed. A similar spirit is echoed in Sword and Quill's Soulblaze, a creature-collecting roguelike that's a bit of Pokémon mixed with tabletop RPGs (dice included). It also pairs colors and icons, adding a high level of customization to color indicators, difficulty, and an extensive text-to-speech function that supports native text-to-speech systems and NVDA. Later, Gales of Nayeli from Blindcoco Studios, a grid-based strategy RPG, showcased its own color blind considerations and an impressive array of visual customization options. Room to breathe A welcome trend carried over from last year, games continue to eschew time pressure and fail states. Dire Kittens Games' Heartspell: Horizon Academy is a puzzle dating simulator that feels like Bejeweled meets Hatoful Boyfriend. Perhaps its most welcome feature is the ability to skip puzzles altogether, though it also features customization for puzzle difficulty. Sunlight from Krillbite Studio is a chill hiking adventure that tasks the player with picking flowers while walking through a serene forest. It does away with navigation as you'll always be heading the right way, while sound cues direct you to nearby flowers. This year's showcase featured two titles from DarZal Games. Quest Giver is a low-stakes management visual novel which casts the player as an NPC handing quests out to RPG heroes, while 6-Sided Stories is a puzzle game involving flipping tiles to reveal an image. The games were presented by Darzington, a developer with chronic hand pain who develops with those needs in mind and, interestingly, with their voice (thanks to Talon Voice). Both games feature no time pressure, no input holds or combos, and allow for one-handed play. Single-handed controls are also a highlight of Crayonix Games' Rollick N' Roll, a puzzle game in which you control the level itself to get toy cars to their goal without the burden of a ticking clock. Highlighting highlights Speaking of highlights, this was another interesting trend to emerge from this year's showcase. Spray Paint Simulator by Whitethorn Games is, in essence, PowerWash Simulator in reverse. Among a suite of accessibility features that help players chill out and paint everything from walls and bridges to what looks like Iron Man's foot, the game allows you to highlight painting tasks and grants a significant level of control over how those highlights appear and how long they last. Whitethorn Games provides accessibility information for all its games here. Cairn, by contrast, is a challenging climbing game from The Game Bakers which looks like transplanting Octodad onto El Capitan. As it encourages players to find new routes up its mountains, the game allows players to highlight their character's limbs, as well as skip quick reaction minigames and rewind falls completely. Highlights are also important to Half Sunk Games' Blow-up: Avenge Humanity, in which players can desaturate the background and customize the size and tone of enemy outlines to make its chaotic gunplay more visible. Something Qudical's Coming Home, which debuted during the showcase, also offers in its tense horror gameplay as you evade a group of murderers. You can switch on a high-contrast mode that highlights objects to distinguish them from the environment (including said killers). Unsighted If this year's been challenging for accessibility, it's been even more disappointing for blind players when it comes to games that are playable independently. The AA Summer Showcase, however, included an interlude showing off the best titles from the recent Games for Blind Gamers 4, a game jam in which all games are designed with unsighted play in mind and judged by blind players. Four games were featured: Lacus Opportunitas by one of last year's standouts shiftBacktick, The Unseen Awakening, Barista, and Necromancer Nonsense. This was chased by a look at Tempo Labs Games' Bits & Bops, a collection of rhythm games with simple controls and designed to be playable in its entirety without sighted assistance. A difficult subject Accessible indie games often favor the cozy, but this year's AA Summer Showcase brought a standout game that bucked that trend. Wednesdays by ARTE France is a game that deals with the aftermath of childhood abuse. That's certainly in keeping with the host of trauma-driven indie games out there. Wednesdays, however, positions itself as a more hopeful examination of that trauma, both through its visual novel style memories and theme park manager gameplay. Like so many of the showcase's games this year, Wednesdays includes mitigations for color blindness — though no essential information is tied to color in-game — as well as a comprehensive text log for cognitive support, manual and automated text scrolling, and customization options for cursor speed, animations, fonts, inputs, and more. Better yet, all those options are displayed at launch and the game always opens in a windowed mode to allow for easier setup of external accessibility tools.
Metro
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Nintendo Switch 2 GameChat feature doesn't censor swear words
A text-to-speech feature on the Nintendo Switch 2 appears to have no limits, as people get to grips with GameChat on the system. After months of waiting, the Nintendo Switch 2 is officially out in the wild and people can finally test the console's capabilities. Many have already discovered how the Switch 2 upgrades for original Switch games are more transformative than initially expected (especially for Pokémon), while other improvements, like the Nintendo eShop actually running well, also go a long way. One feature which has flown under the radar is GameChat, which allows you to chat with friends while playing a game, share your screen, and if you a have a camera, broadcast your face during rounds of Mario Kart World. In a boon for accessibility, the feature also comes with a speech-to-text feature and, naturally, people are testing its limits. As highlighted by Bluesky user David Howe, GameChat's speech-to-text tool doesn't censor swear words. 'CONFIRMED: you can say f**k in game chat speech-to-text,' they wrote, with a picture showing an explicit exchange with a friend. While Nintendo is known for being strict when it comes to online communication to protect its family-friendly reputation, this is perhaps a different case for several reasons. Firstly, GameChat only works between people you've added on your friends list, so it's a private space. It also requires players to register a phone number, so it isn't easily accessible to young children. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Crucially, the speech-to-text tool is an accessibility feature. In a Bluesky post, journalist and accessibility consultant, Laura Kate Dale, praised Nintendo for not censoring swearing 'by default' unlike some other platforms and described it as a 'accessibility win for disabled people'. More Trending If you want to turn on the speech-to-text tool in GameChat, you can activate it in the Switch 2 console's accessibility settings. While GameChat is private theoretically, it does require you to consent to terms whereby chat content is 'recorded and stored temporarily' on your system. As reported by Ars Technica, these stored recordings may be shared with Nintendo, but only if a user reports a violation of the company's community guidelines. However, these recordings are 'available only if the report is submitted within 24 hours', implying the footage will be deleted from local storage after a day. Many retailers have sold out following the Switch 2's launch on June 5, although you might have some luck if you head down to certain stores. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Games Inbox: Is Mario Kart World on Nintendo Switch 2 a disappointment? MORE: New Nintendo patent sparks talk of Ring Fit Adventure 2 on Switch 2 MORE: Nintendo Switch 2 save data transfer – what to do if it doesn't work
The Verge
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
As the game industry cuts back, accessibility is feeling the impact
Video game consultants like Laura Kate Dale came into 2023 with a lot of hope. Since 2020, accessibility in games had become a mainstream discussion, bolstered by high-profile releases like The Last of Us Part II, and it appeared things could only get better. Yet, as the year drew on, she says, 'there started to be signs that, behind the scenes, accessibility advancement was slowing down.' Now, that momentum has come to a relative standstill. Consultants speaking to The Verge paint a picture of repetitive conversations, fighting to maintain basics that should already be established, and a sense that the broader industry has taken its foot off the gas after the early months of the incipient covid-19 pandemic provided a real sense of hope that accessibility was here to stay. 'The gaming culture of that time is a reflection of catering to the disabled experience, because accessibility was sorely needed by everyone,' says Kaemsi, an online broadcaster. 'The rise of accessibility back in 2020 was almost a promise that, when we started recovering from the lockdowns, the world would start considering everyone in all facets of living, and all we needed to do was give people a chance to recover from having to deal with such an unprecedented time.' But as that recovery set in, the world instead brute-forced a return to 2019 norms. Following lockdown successes such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the bubble burst. As industry-wide downscaling started partway through 2023, dedicated accessibility roles were among the first culled to save cash, according to Dale. 'Gigs started to be cancelled without clear explanation,' she adds, while those accessibility champions that remained were told 'their budgets were shrinking, or they were expected to fight harder to justify any new or more experimental investment in accessibility.' Things are yet to improve. Layoffs and studio closures continue, while consultants who led the charge in 2020 are still fighting the same battles years later to maintain basics. 'It can feel a little defeating to focus energy on fighting for standardizing things already proven to work and proven to win positive headlines from the games media,' Dale says. Despite the media's value as a way to start, and maintain, accessibility conversations, those positive headlines are also disappearing in a media landscape reckoning with its own calamity (most recently evidenced by Polygon 's sale to Valnet). As consultant and content creator Steve Saylor suggests, outside tired cyclical discourse such as difficulty in Souls-likes and yellow paint, accessibility topics have mostly fallen out of public consciousness. 'There's no nuance to that conversation,' he says. 'People understand accessibility is important, but they're not willing to learn more beyond that.' 'We're still trying our best, but it's rough.' But that coverage is also critical for moving accessibility forward, providing publishers with a marketing incentive for accessibility features. 'The less publishers are imagining their big stab at getting similar press coverage, the less they seem willing to take a chance on a feature nobody's tried to offer before,' Dale says. She points to the extensive coverage The Last of Us Part II received for its accessibility prior to release as a major motivator for others to follow suit in the immediate aftermath. Now, she adds, accessibility consultants are increasingly employed in scaling back accessibility, with the least backlash, to help mitigate the industry's lockdown-era overspend. This creates an environment that isn't conducive to change and improvement, and saps energy from an already frequently exhausted community. Professional opportunities have dried up to the point that many advocates are looking elsewhere for work, where only a few years before there was hope accessibility could become a full-time pursuit. 'We're still trying our best, but it's rough,' says Saylor, before adding that he's barely had consultancy work over the past year. 'I don't know when it's going to pick back up again. It's been getting worse since 2023.' Even when the call does come, often those offers will end up being rescinded. 'I've had at least three major AAA studios offer me accessibility consulting work in the past 18 months,' Dale says, 'only for them to cancel the planned consulting work because the budget for that work was withdrawn by management.' 'People in the accessibility community are tired,' Kaemsi says, summing up how many speaking to The Verge feel. Nor does it look to be improving in 2025. As relations fray between Donald Trump's government and other nations, with many countries issuing travel advisories to the US, 'it's getting harder and harder to even potentially cross the border,' Saylor, who lives in Canada, says. '90 percent of my work was in the US and if that's gone, I don't know what that means for me going forward.' Similarly, with so much of the gaming industry tied to the US, federal-level attacks on anything resembling inclusion in the name of pushing back against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies (DEI) are making it dangerous for many advocates to continue fighting for inclusivity. There is still some cause for hope A side effect of so many consultants leaving the industry is that they're also taking much of their knowledge with them. While many studios are maintaining features implemented in previous games, Dale says 'knowledge of why those features are implemented, and why they're handled in a specific way, is being lost.' Per multiple sources, this has only worsened as the industry embraces contractors instead of full-time work, in which consultants are employed for a single project and then let go, often without leaving a record of their knowledge and practices behind, making communication even harder. Dale cites multiple occasions where she was brought in to consult on separate projects for a studio only to find information wasn't being disseminated across teams. 'The end result is me being brought in to teach the same lesson more than once, a sign that somewhere along the line that knowledge isn't making it from one project to the next,' she says. Yet there is still some cause for hope. Games like South of Midnight, which includes among its impressive accessibility suite the ability to skip boss fights, prove that accessibility remains a concern for many studios. In announcing the Switch 2, Nintendo has signaled its first stuttering steps toward a more holistic approach to accessibility after years of stubborn resistance. Elsewhere, major publishers, including Nintendo of America, have agreed to share clearer and consistent information about accessibility on storefronts. These are small wins in spite of a broader industry slowdown around accessibility. If repetition is one signal of how profound that rut has become, it's also perhaps an important tool for arresting this decline. 'Being repetitive, asking for features nobody is delivering, and asking for teams to try features until it's embarrassing not to offer them,' Dale says. 'That's the only way things are going to change.'
