Steam Announces New Accessibility Options for Gamers

Steam has recently announced that it will start listing multiple accessibility options for its games soon. Steam has been increasingly adding more and more quality-of-life features to its platform recently, and this change will help gamers who want to know more about the titles they’re interested in before they purchase them.

Originally released by Valve in 2003, Steam is the largest PC gaming platform in the world. The platform has risen in popularity over the years due to its consumer-friendly choices, and as gamers have built their libraries on Steam, it has maintained a strong user base. Steam has recently crossed the threshold of over 40 million simultaneous players, showing that the platform keeps growing every year.

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Now, a recent Steamworks update announced that the thousands of games available on the platform will show information about accessibility on their pages soon. Steam is sending out questionnaires about accessibility to developers, and this information will allow gamers to understand whether a title is a good fit for them. The options include four categories: Gameplay, Audio, Visual, and Input. Each category will have a few boxes that can be ticked if the option is available in the game.

Accessibility Options Listed By Steam

• Gameplay: Adjustable Difficulty, Save Anytime.
• Audio: Custom Volume Controls, Narrated Game Menus, Stereo Sound, Surround Sound.
• Visual: Adjustable Text Size, Subtitle Options, Color Alternatives, Camera Comfort.
• Input: Keyboard Only Option, Mouse Only Option, Touch Only Option, Playable without Timed Input, Text-to-speech, Speech-to-text communications.

For example, the Gameplay category includes “Adjustable Difficulty” and “Save Anytime” as features, indicating if gamers need to use specific save points or checkpoints to save their progress, and if there are multiple difficulty levels to choose from. Some options in the other categories include whether gamers can customize volume controls, listen to game menus with narrated audio, adjust the text size on the screen, enable subtitles, play only with a mouse or the keyboard, and more. According to Steam, developers will have “a few months” to answer the questionnaire, which will then be available before the end of 2025. Hopefully, this will be very helpful for gamers looking to pick their next Steam game.

This new tool will possibly be even more helpful for gamers with disabilities, as it includes options such as indicating whether a title has a colorblind mode. Recently, Steam has added more and more accessibility options, such as warning Steam players when early access titles do not receive updates after a few months.

In another recent change, Steam forbade paid advertising as a revenue model on the platform. After this change, developers could no longer force users to engage with ads to unlock goodies or access gameplay features. Hopefully, these pro-consumer updates will continue, improving the usability of the popular PC gaming platform.

Steam

Brand

Valve

Original Release Date

September 12, 2003

Original MSRP (USD)

N/A

Weight

N/A