Accessibility settings: what to check before you buy, and what the law actually covers

Two people can read the same store page and be asking entirely different questions. One wants to know whether the game is any good. The other needs to know whether they can play it at all — and the page, which lists genre, file size and a trailer, will not say.

That second question has an answer, and it is easier to find than it used to be. But before you spend an evening checking, it is worth knowing which parts of the answer are guaranteed by law and which are promises from a publisher. The split decides how much work you have to do yourself, and it is not where most people assume it is.

Ask about features, not about accessibility

“Is this game accessible?” has no answer, in the same way that “is this shoe comfortable?” has no answer. Accessibility is a relationship between one design and one person’s hands, eyes, ears and attention. A game that is perfectly playable with one hand can be unplayable with low vision, and the reverse is just as common. Anyone who tells you a title is or is not accessible is describing their own body.

The workable form of the question is narrower and answerable: which two or three features do I need, and does this title have them? The industry has converged on vocabulary for that, and it is worth borrowing. The cross-industry tag set divides features into four families — visual, auditory, input and gameplay — which is close to how the problem actually breaks down when you sit in front of a controller.

This is not a niche concern. The CDC’s disability data puts more than 1 in 4 U.S. adults living with some type of disability. Not all of that is relevant to games, but enough of it is that the tags exist at all.

The one part that is a legal requirement — and it is only the chat

Here is the part almost nobody gets right, including a lot of articles about it.

There is a federal law that reaches video games. It is the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, the CVAA. Section 716 of the Act, codified at 47 U.S.C. § 617, requires providers of advanced communications services — and manufacturers of equipment used with them — to make those services and that equipment accessible to and usable by people with disabilities, unless doing so is not achievable. The FCC’s rules implementing it sit at 47 C.F.R. Part 14.

Advanced communications services are a defined list: interconnected VoIP, non-interconnected VoIP, electronic messaging, and interoperable video conferencing. The FCC’s own consumer guide is explicit about how that lands on games. Online multiplayer games and gaming platforms, it says, “often include non-interconnected VoIP and electronic messaging as real-time communications options for players,” and it gives the examples directly: in-game voice or text chat between two or more people, and a console-wide “party” voice chat with individual and group messaging.

So the chat is covered. That is the whole of it. The obligations come in a specific order, and the order matters:

• Build accessibility into the game or the platform’s software, or
• use third-party accessibility solutions that are available to consumers at nominal cost. If neither of those is achievable, the developer must make the service and equipment compatible with peripheral devices commonly used by people with disabilities — screen readers, specialized switches — if that is achievable.
• A company providing these services must not install network features that impede accessibility or usability. This one is the sleeper: it forbids the arrangement where an accessibility solution technically exists but something in the network path breaks it.

“Accessible” and “usable” are also defined rather than left to taste. To be accessible, a player must be able to locate, identify and operate the function — a player who is blind has to be able to find and operate the text chat, which is why the FCC’s examples include reading chat aloud with text-to-speech. To be usable, the documentation, instructions and support channels have to be reachable too.

And then the boundary, in the Commission’s own words: the rules “do not cover non-communications aspects of video games.” There is also a carve-out worth knowing — if a game company’s only involvement in messaging is letting players reach somebody else’s separate messaging service, the company is not subject to the requirements for that.

Read that plainly, because it is the single most useful fact in this article: the federal requirement is about talking to other people inside the game, not about whether the game itself can be played. Subtitles, remappable controls, difficulty options, text size — none of it is owed to you by federal law.

This was not always switched on. The FCC granted the game industry a series of class waivers of these requirements, and they narrowed over time. The 2015 order extended the waiver covering video game software to January 1, 2017. In December 2017 the Commission granted one more year, running through December 31, 2018 (DA-17-1243, 32 FCC Rcd 10448). The FCC’s consumer guide on video games, published in April 2025, states the obligations as live. If a game’s chat does not work for you, the rules apply to it — not to the rest of the disc.

Almost everything you are actually checking for is voluntary

The features people most often need — large and adjustable subtitles, input remapping, difficulty options, no button mashing — live in the voluntary layer. It is worth seeing how candid the industry is about that.

Microsoft publishes the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines, currently at version 3.2, a numbered set running from XAG 101 (text display) to XAG 123 (mental health best practices). The introduction describes them as “a set of best practices,” and says the quiet part out loud: they “aren’t intended to act as a checklist to validate any type of compliance or legal requirements.”

That is not a dodge; it is the accurate description of the entire field. XAG 119, on speech-to-text and text-to-speech chat, sits beside the one guideline area where there is a legal floor — and everything around it is a commitment by the maker. Which is exactly why you verify rather than assume.

Where to check, before the money leaves

Three places, in descending order of how close they are to the purchase.

The store listing’s own tags. Microsoft’s Game Accessibility Feature Tags went live in the Microsoft Store on November 16, 2021, with 20 tags. Getting a tag is not free-form marketing: each has criteria the developer has to meet. The company’s own example is the subtitle tag — a game cannot claim it merely by having subtitles, since the text must meet a size threshold and be resizable well beyond it. You can filter by them on the console (open the Store, browse a category, press X for filters, choose Accessibility), in the Xbox app for PC, and on xbox.com.

A shared standard, so the vocabulary stops moving. On March 20, 2025, the Entertainment Software Association announced the Accessible Games Initiative at the Game Developers Conference with Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft, Nintendo of America and Ubisoft as founding members; Amazon Games, Riot Games, Square Enix and Warner Bros. Games joined, and Sony Interactive Entertainment is named among the companies that first developed the idea. It launched with 24 tags in the four families above — visual, auditory, input and gameplay — with published criteria for each, in U.S. English at launch. The full definitions are public at accessiblegames.com.

Two caveats before you rely on it. Implementation is voluntary, decided company by company, so a game without a tag is not a game without the feature — the tag is a disclosure tool, and its absence tells you less than its presence. And the tags are self-applied: each has published criteria, but whether a game meets them is the publisher’s own call. Read the tag as a strong hint from the party with the most to gain.

Third-party databases, when the tags do not cover your feature. The published tag sets are deliberately short, and if the thing that stops you is something narrower — one-switch play, a specific reading load, motion comfort — the reviews written by disabled players go deeper than any store tag. Can I Play That? and the Family Gaming Database both organize their listings around accessibility, and the Game Accessibility Guidelines is useful as a vocabulary even though it is written for developers. The caveat that reputable disability organizations attach to all of them is worth repeating: a listing is not a guarantee, and a game that appears in a database is not thereby fully playable for you.

The part money can fix

Some barriers are hardware, and both console makers now sell a product for that case rather than leaving it to custom workshops.

Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller was the pivot: a large, flat unit with two oversized programmable buttons and connectivity for the switches and joysticks players already own, released September 4, 2018, at $99.99.

Sony’s Access controller is the more recent, more configurable kit. It launched globally on December 6, 2023, at a suggested retail price of $89.99. The box holds 19 button caps and 3 stick caps, the controller can be operated from any orientation and used on a wheelchair tray, four 3.5mm expansion ports accept third-party switches, up to 30 control profiles can be configured on the console, three can be stored on the controller itself, and two Access controllers can be combined with one DualSense to act as a single virtual controller.

Both are sold separately from the console, at the prices above, which is the real barrier and the one no store tag addresses. It is also the part where nonprofit organizations do the most direct work: AbleGamers and SpecialEffect both work on adaptive setups and equipment, and they are the right first stop before you buy a workaround someone has already solved.

If the chat is the problem, there is a federal process

This is the one place where you have an actual lever, and it is underused because almost nobody knows it exists.

Start with the company — advanced communications service providers are required to file contact information with the FCC, and the Commission publishes it. Whether or not you do that first, you can ask the FCC’s Disability Rights Office for help by filing a request for dispute assistance, either through the FCC’s Consumer Inquiries and Complaints Center or the form at fcc.gov/RDAform, by email to dro@fcc.gov, or by letter. The office must work with you and the company for at least 30 days before you can escalate to an informal complaint with the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau; you can also request a further 30 days. Your case closes if you take no action for 60 days after the initial 30-day window ends.

Make the request specific, because it is evaluated as an evidence problem: the device and model, when you bought or tried to use it, when you noticed the problem, what you did to try to solve it, how the company responded, and what you want changed. Note what this route is not. It is a complaint process inside a regulator, not a lawsuit, and the outcome you are aiming for is the accessibility the rules already require — not compensation.

The order to do it in

1. Name the two or three features you actually need, in plain language, before you look at anything. “Subtitles I can read” and “no rapid button presses” are checkable; “accessible” is not.
2. Translate them into the published vocabulary — the Accessible Games Initiative tags if you are comparing across platforms, or Microsoft’s feature tags if you are on Xbox — because that is the language the listings are written in.
3. Check the listing’s tags and the store filter. Presence tells you something real; absence tells you to keep looking.
4. Check a database written by disabled players if the tag set is too coarse for your feature.
5. If you will play online, check the chat specifically — in-game voice and text, and the platform’s party chat, which is a separate system with separate settings and is exactly the surface the federal rules cover.
6. Buy where you can return it. A tag is a claim; playing the game is the test, and the only way to convert one into the other is a refund window wide enough to use.
7. If the chat is the barrier and the company will not move, file the dispute assistance request. It costs nothing and it is the one step on this list that produces an enforceable answer.

The honest summary: accessibility information for games got dramatically better in a short period, but it is voluntary and it is young. The legal guarantee is narrower than the marketing around it suggests — it covers the chat, not the game. So check before you pay, buy where you can return, and treat every tag as a lead rather than a promise.