4 Accessible Games For The Deaf Or Those With Hearing Disabilities
Game inclusivity for deaf people means customisable subtitles and adaptive controllers.
By Alia Kamelia — 07 Sep 2022, 03:38 PM
It's officially Deaf Awareness month, and this time around, we are diving into the gaming industry and its inclusivity efforts for deaf and hard-of-hearing gamers
When we think about gaming, elements like audio cues and atmospheric sounds immediately come to mind. Nothing makes a game more immersive than a good soundtrack and gorgeous graphics.
But how is the gaming experience like for deaf and hard-of-hearing people?
The gaming experience for gamers who are deaf or have hearing disabilities have been less than amicable
In an article from I Need Diverse Games, the author, Melanie Jayne Ashford discussed the inaccessibility issue for hearing-impaired gamers.
Some of the prevalent issues for hearing-impaired gamers include:
- Competitive multiplayer games are hard to play due to inability to hear an enemy's footsteps or nearby loot, and have no way of communicating through voice chat.
- Roleplaying (RPG) games are mostly well-captioned, but most side quest instructions are voiceovers, hence causing a gamer who is hearing-impaired to miss the instructions completely.
Recently, there have been more conversations in the gaming community about adding features to a game to cater to the deaf and hard-of-hearing gaming population
In an article from Accessibility, the issues for games when it comes to providing features to include the deaf community include useless audio cues, voice chats, audio instructions, as well as lack of subtitles and closed captions.
In Malaysia, approximately 40,000 people are legally deaf as of 2018, whereas about 20% of the 1.8 billion players in the global gaming community have a form of hearing impairment as of 2017.
Some game developers have started ensuring that the deaf gaming community is not alienated.
Let's take a look at four games that have become benchmarks in including deaf and hard-of-hearing friendly features in its gameplay:
1. The Last of Us Part II (2020)
Developed by game studio, Naughty Dog, The Last of Us Part II (2020) has received praises in their accessibility efforts.
There are configuration settings customised for deaf and hard-of-hearing gamers. Gamers are given awareness indicators and dodge prompts that do not rely on audio cues.
On top of providing captions, names of characters who are speaking are also included to allow gamers to follow the storyline easily.
Instead of relying solely on audio cues, the gaming controllers will also vibrate during combat, which helps gamers with hearing impairment to know when to dodge or attack.
Currently, the game is only available on PlayStation.
Buy The Last of Us Part II here and watch the trailer below:
2. Moss (2018)
Moss (2018) is an action-adventure puzzle game for Virtual Reality (VR) platform developed by Polyarc Games.
One of the first VR games to cater to deaf and hard-of-hearing gamers, this game follows the story of a mouse named Quill, who meets an unknown entity (the player). Together, they help one another to solve puzzles and obstacles they encounter along the way.
Not a lot of VR games — or games in general — include sign language as the 'dialogue.' However, Quill is able to communicate with the player using American Sign Language (ASL).
The integration of sign language was a way to work around the fact that, well, mice can't speak.
To combat that, animation director Richard Lico said in a tweet that, "Since she can only squeak, I figured I'd play around with ways she can communicate with the player. Also a great perk for our deaf players."
However, in the full game, the signs will be limited to "puzzle hints, reactions, and emotional responses," as explained in another tweet.
While this game lacks full captioning for immersion, it does have well-made subtitles and helpful visual cues.
The game is available to play on PC and VR platforms (HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality, and Valve Index).
Buy the game here and watch the trailer below:
3. Gears 5 (2019)
Gears 5 (2019), a game developed by The Coalition, is another good example of accessibility in games. While it may be a gory game with violence, the game has several features that allows for accessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing gamers.
The dialogue in game is subtitled, with size and background options. There are also closed captions provided for sounds and music changes. To top it all off, they even include how the dialogue is being expressed by the character, like yelling or groaning.
The game is available on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
Download the game here and watch the trailer below:
4. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2021)
Developed by Insomniac Games, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2021) is one of the games that followed in Naughty Dog's footsteps after the release of The Last of Us Part II to include accessibility features in the game.
The result of that is highly-customisable subtitles that come with speaker labels, colours, and different backgrounds. Every dialogue in the game is fully-subtitled.
There are also visual cues, large waypoints, and several presets for controller vibrations for PS5's DualSense controller.
The game is only available on PS5.
Buy the game here and watch the trailer below:
Another way game developers have started including hearing-impaired gamers is definitely the speech-to-text feature that allows players to communicate in game
Speech-to-text is undoubtedly one of the easiest features to include in game to enable players to communicate with deaf and hard-of-hearing gamers, and vice versa.
Some of these games that we will be mentioning in the next segment have a proximity voice chat feature, which allows for a more accurate activation of speech-to-text.
However, it's worth noting that this feature may be unstable and not as accurate in interpreting what is said in game by players.
