Steam adds more accessibility features and Valve says it's just the start, wants players with disabilities to provide more feedback and suggestions
Valve is currently in the middle of a big push towards improving both Steam's accessibility features, and those of the games it hosts. In April it announced the Steam store would start highlighting accessibility features on store pages then, once this feature dropped, allowed users to start searching for games by individual accessibility features.
Now, Valve is testing out new accessibility settings in Steam Beta (which any user can easily opt-in to test out). Today's Beta update adds new accessibility options in Big Picture Mode and on devices running SteamOS such as Steam Deck. The features include:
- UI scaling, high contrast mode, and reduced motion features (in both Big Picture Mode, and on devices running SteamOS)
- Screen reader and color filter settings (on devices running SteamOS only)
Players who use screen readers on desktop are being asked to use Big Picture mode for now, which supports this functionality, as well as being better suited for keyboard navigation.
There's a new accessibility menu in the main settings drop-down, which lets players tweak the features. The UI Scaling allows you to use a slider to adjust text size, and you can adjust the pitch, speed and volume of the Screen Reader (so if you want to be guided by a hyperactive pixie voice, now you can).
High Contrast Mode makes it easier to see text and buttons on backgrounds, while the Reduce Motion option disables various animations and page transitions. This comes alongside a new Color Filter that changes the display for both Steam and games, allowing you to view in Grayscale, invert brightness, or invert the display colours.
Valve emphasises that "these are just the first accessibility features we're making available as we continue our work to improve accessibility of Steam on all devices." It says more tools are on the way and, to that end, is particularly encouraging players with disabilities to provide feedback and suggestions in this thread.
The push towards better accessibility settings has thus far proven popular, with Valve saying recently that "over 5,000 applications have added details about their accessibility support (with more developers updating their games each day)."
These toggles are well worth a look to find games that, for example, provide "color alternatives", because certain games can prove impossible to play for people with color blindness. Others like "save anytime" and "adjustable text size" are just nice for everyone to have: and I can well imagine that, in years to come, I'll be reaching for the latter myself.