Steam adds accessibility features to store pages and filters for searching

As Valve announced back in April, they've now added accessibility feature support to game pages on Steam pages and filters for searching.

Valve said "This update comes after gathering valuable feedback from developers as well as players with disabilities, and over 5,000 applications have added details about their accessibility support (with more developers updating their games each day)".

Using Timberborn as my example, when you scroll down a bit on the right you'll see the Accessibility Features note with the number it has in brackets. If you click it, you will then get the list of what the game supports.

This is a manual process for developers to tell Valve what their games support. It's not required but Valve highly recommends developers to do it. There's no reason not to add the tags to game pages, it could easily result in more sales.

Features include:

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

When you go to search for a game on Steam, you can scroll down a bit and on the right panel there will be options you can tick to filters games based on your accessibility requirements.

You can read more about each on the Steamworks documentation.

Why now then? Well the European Accessibility Act comes into effect June 28th, so this is Valve getting ahead of it coming in and likely being penalised if they didn't do anything.

Source: Valve