Sony has announced that accessibility tags will begin appearing for games in the PlayStation Store on PS5 consoles.
The idea here is that when you’re browsing the PlayStation Store, you can check up on the accessibility features of a particular game. These include a slew of different features, from offering an option for large text to screen reader support to being able to adjust subtitle size and remap buttons. It will also let you know whether or not puzzles are skippable and whether there’s ping communication support for multiplayer.
All of these different accessibility features PlayStation is splitting up into more than 50 different ‘accessibility tags’ divided into six core categories:
- Visual accessibility features, such as clear text, large text, color alternatives, audio cues and directional audio indicators.
- Audio features, such as volume controls, mono audio, screen reader and visual cue alternatives.
- Subtitle and caption options, including subtitle size, clear captions, and large captions.
- Control options, including button remapping, thumbstick sensitivity, and ability to play without button holds, rapid button presses or motion control.
- Gameplay options, such as difficulty settings, skippable puzzles, simplified quick time events, and game speed.
- Online communication options, such as text or voice chat transcription and ping communication.
Accessibility tags are set to start rolling out this week. PlayStation promises that a number of games will be getting support for these tags when the feature launches, including Days Gone, Death Stranding Director’s Cut, Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut, God of War, God of War Ragnarök, Gran Turismo 7, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and Returnal. In time, of course, Sony plans for a wide range of different games to support these tags.
Even if you don’t suffer from a particular disability, these tags may prove useful to you. Maybe you only want to play games with an ‘Easy’ difficulty mode, maybe you need the ability to remap buttons in a particular game, or maybe there’s something else you care about. Either way, soon you’ll be able to get access to all that information at a glance with accessibility tags on PS5.
