Search for any game plus the word "accessibility" and you will find the same article ten times. Someone has photographed the options menu and typed the labels out underneath. Subtitles: yes. Colourblind mode: yes. Remapping: yes.
That tells you almost nothing.
It does not tell you whether the subtitles have a background, or whether the colourblind mode is a real colour remap or a hue slider someone added in an afternoon. It does not tell you that the remapping menu will not let you touch the sticks. And it never tells you the thing that actually decides whether a game is playable for someone: how far into the game you have to get before you can change any of it.
So we are starting a series. It is called The Accessibility Options, which is both the name of the menu we are reviewing and the right word for what a studio chooses to give its players.
We play the game, we score its accessibility settings against the same rubric every time, and we publish the rubric up front so you can argue with it. This post is the rubric. Every review links back here.
Why a scoring system at all
Two reasons.
Comparison. A list is a snapshot. A score is a position. If game twelve gets 19 out of 25 and game three got 11, that comparison means something, because both were measured against identical criteria by the same person. Without a fixed rubric you are just reading someone's mood on the day.
Falsifiability. A number you can disagree with is more honest than prose you cannot. If we give a game 3 out of 5 for Hearing and you think it deserves 4, the criteria are right here and you can tell us exactly where we were wrong. That is the point.
The scale
Every category is scored 0 to 5. The scale is anchored to the tiers in the Game Accessibility Guidelines, a developer reference that has been maintained since 2012 and sorts its recommendations into Basic, Intermediate and Advanced. Borrowing their tiers keeps our scoring tied to something external rather than to how generous we feel.
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| 0 | Absent. The option does not exist |
| 1 | Token. One toggle, no granularity |
| 2 | Partial. Present but misses common needs |
| 3 | Solid. Covers the Basic tier properly |
| 4 | Thorough. Intermediate tier, genuinely granular |
| 5 | Exceptional. Advanced tier, other studios should copy this |
Five categories, 5 points each, 25 total.
A 3 is not a bad score. A 3 means the studio did the expected work and did it competently. Most games we review will score 2s and 3s, and that is a fair reflection of the industry rather than a criticism of any one game.
The five categories
1. Seeing
Everything that matters if your vision is limited, or if you play on a television across the room, which is more people than you might think.
We check: subtitle size, subtitle background or outline, speaker labels, text scaling across menus and not just dialogue, colourblind modes and whether they genuinely remap colour or merely tint the screen, HUD scaling, contrast and outline options for enemies or interactive objects, motion blur, camera shake, field of view, and whether the game warns about flashing before it flashes.
The common failure here is a game with beautiful large subtitles and 11 pixel menu text.
2. Hearing
Everything that matters if you are deaf, hard of hearing, or playing with the sound off because someone is asleep.
We check: independent volume sliders rather than one master, a mono audio option (essential if you have hearing in one ear, and trivial to implement), visual indicators for sound that carries information, directional damage indicators, and whether subtitles identify who is speaking when several characters talk.
The common failure is treating subtitles as the whole of hearing accessibility. Subtitles do not tell you a grenade landed behind you.
3. Playing
Everything that matters if your hands, arms or reaction times are not what a designer assumed.
We check: full button remapping including the sticks and triggers, hold versus toggle for every hold action rather than just sprint, alternatives to quick time events and button mashing, sensitivity and deadzone control, whether the game is realistically playable one handed, and whether keyboard and controller get the same options.
The common failure is a remapping screen that greys out exactly the buttons you need to move.
4. Understanding
Everything that matters for memory, attention, reading and processing.
We check: difficulty granularity, and specifically whether combat, puzzle and platforming difficulty can be set separately; objective markers and waypoints; whether tutorials can be replayed; text speed and whether dialogue advances on a timer you cannot control; a glossary or story recap for anyone returning after a month; and whether anything critical is communicated by text alone.
The common failure is a single difficulty slider that makes enemies tankier without touching the puzzle that actually stopped you.
5. Finding it
This is the category nobody else scores, and it is the one we care most about.
Every option above is worthless if a player cannot reach it. So we measure the settings themselves as an interface:
- Can you configure before you are committed? Are the accessibility options available from the title screen, or are they behind an unskippable prologue?
- How deep are they? Counted in menus. Are they in their own clearly named section, or scattered across Video, Audio, Gameplay and Interface?
- Does the store page tell you before you buy? Microsoft's Xbox Accessibility Guidelines, version 3.2, dedicate an entire guideline (XAG 121) to players being able to work out whether a game will be playable for them before they pay for it. Almost nobody does this.
- Do changes apply immediately? Or does the game need a restart, forcing you to guess.
- Do they persist? Across sessions, across profiles, after a patch.
A studio can implement a genuinely excellent subtitle system and still fail disabled players by burying it behind twenty minutes of unskippable cutscene. That is a real failure and it deserves a real score.
What each review will actually contain
Every post in this series follows the same shape, so you can skim to the part you need.
The scorecard, at the top. A table with the five category scores and the total. No scrolling to find the number.
Every setting, listed. A table per category of what the game genuinely offers, with the exact values available. Not "has subtitles" but the actual choices. If you are trying to decide whether a game will work for you, you need the values, not a tick.
The tables look like this. The rows below are illustrative, showing the shape rather than any real game:
| Setting | Options available | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Subtitles | Off, Small, Medium, Large | |
| Subtitle background | None, 50%, 75%, Solid | Applies to dialogue only, not tutorial popups |
| Speaker names | On, Off | Colour coded per character |
| Text size | Slider, 80% to 200% | Menus scale, on screen prompts do not |
| Colourblind mode | Off, Protanopia, Deuteranopia, Tritanopia | With an intensity slider |
| Motion blur | On, Off | |
| Camera shake | Slider, 0 to 100% |
Three columns, because the third one is where the truth usually lives. A game can list a text size slider and still leave half the interface fixed, and that belongs in the notes rather than in a tick box.
What is missing. The same rubric run in reverse. A short checklist of the things the game does not offer, because the absences are usually why someone bounces off a game, and nobody publishes them.
Where to find them. The literal menu path, and how far into the game you can first reach it.
The one thing they nailed and the one thing they missed. Two short sections. Specific, not general.
Set these three first. For anyone who just wants to play: the three settings worth changing before you start.
Who it works for, and who it does not. Plainly. Some games are not going to work for some players and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
How we test
Everything is tested first hand on hardware we own, and screenshots come from our own captures rather than press kits. Where a setting behaves differently on different platforms, we say which platform we tested on, because the same game can ship different options on PC, console and handheld.
We are not sponsored by anyone and we buy the games.
We will also get things wrong. Accessibility options move between patches, and some are buried well enough that we will miss them. Every review carries a last-tested date, and if you find a setting we missed, tell us and we will correct the post and say that we did.
What this series is not
It is not a review of whether a game is good. A tremendous game can score 8 out of 25 and a mediocre one can score 22. We are measuring one specific thing.
It is not a compliance audit either. The Game Accessibility Guidelines are recommendations, not law, and the Xbox guidelines say plainly that they are not a compliance checklist. Nobody fails an audit here. The score describes how much of the work a studio chose to do.
And it is not an attack on small teams. Some of the items above cost real money to build. Mono audio does not, and it is genuinely surprising how many games ship without it.
Why we are doing this
We build accessibility tools for a living, which mostly means browser extensions and web tools rather than games. Our own extension, Helperbird, does for a web page roughly what a good accessibility menu does for a game: it lets someone change how a thing is presented until it works for them. The questions turn out to be the same ones. When we built our colour contrast checker, the hard part was never the maths. It was making the results legible to someone who had never heard of WCAG. Games have exactly that problem, at a much larger scale, with far more at stake for the player.
We have written before about reviewing a product through an accessibility lens rather than a features lens, and about what happens when products decay because nobody is measuring them. This series is both of those ideas pointed at games.
Mostly though, it is this. Roughly one in six people has a disability. Games are the medium that most often forgets it, and the fix is frequently a checkbox that took an afternoon. Publishing a score is a small amount of pressure in the right direction.
The Accessibility Options runs as long as there are games worth measuring, which is all of them. The running scoreboard goes up once there are enough reviews to rank. First game lands next.