This is a part of the technology for visually impaired players that should be standard it improves the experience by giving these players descriptions of scenes and actions along with dialogue, helping them mentally picture the action playing out on screen. This opens up text-heavy game elements like menus to visually impaired players.Ĭaptions still aren't ubiquitous, and games are even less likely to include audio description soundtracks. Similar to how sound is translated into text, any text-based element should be able to be read aloud by a screen reader. It would be emboldening to see all of these options become standard in the same way that Closed Captions have become legal requirements for broadcast television and VoD with the input of their intended audience on the design.
Visual cues and icons for important sound events are at least becoming more common in games today. The overly detailed captions in Marvel's The Avengers show a misunderstanding of the feature. There have been recent advances in including captions in big games, but this also means some games will try to deliver useful captions but get it wrong. The absence of well-written captions flattens sound design for these players. Captions are subtitles specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences that convey non-dialogue sound during cutscenes. There are also many games where captions are absent. Having a toggleable deep contrast background behind subtitles, placing them on a part of the screen that doesn’t cover other text, and having font size controls as standard are starter kit options for making subtitles truly accessible.