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Steam will soon start making it easier for players to search for games based on accessibility features

steamcommunity.com

Steam :: Steamworks Development :: New: Showing Accessibility support for your games on Steam

What's New

Steamworks has a new accessibility-support questionnaire for developers to better describe the way their games support accessibility. If your game supports Accessibility features, you can now specify that information within Steamworks.

  • Gameplay options, like adjustable difficulty
  • Audio accessibility features, including custom volume controls and narrated game menus
  • Visual accessibility features, including adjustable text size and color alternatives
  • Input options, which include chat speech-to-text and text-to-speech

Later in the year (once we've given developers time to work on it from their end) we'll start sharing the resulting information with players in the Steam store and Steam desktop client.

15 comments

  • I wish that Steam would just unify all their damn search UIs. Like, take every criteria that they let a user search by all across their client and different parts of their website, and then make one unified UI for it and let a user search using that UI everywhere Steam permits for searches. Steam's got the most-insanely-fragmented set of search UIs I've ever seen on an online service, which all have overlapping sets of functionality.

    Among other things:

    • Sometimes permitting searching by a Boolean value --- but only for one of the values. For example, searching the Store in the Web UI lets you exclude games in your library, but not include only games in your library. This is despite the fact that for tags, there's a tri-state (Yes, No, Ignore) checkbox (at least now they do...they didn't used to permit for exclusion there either at one point).
    • In the Store search, I can put an upper limit on the price I'm searching for, but not a lower limit.
    • It's easy to pull up a list of games by a particular developer or publisher by clicking on their name in a game's store page, but then one can't use the Store search criteria to filter that down, nor can one search by developer or publisher in the Store.
    • Just today, I wanted to sort my games in the left-hand Library sidebar of the client by release date. The Steam client can't do that...but you can create a shelf, another sort of search visible in the Library, sorted by Release Date.
    • I can sort by User Rating in the Store, but not in my Library.
    • I can sort by Release Date in the Store, but not search by it.

    I want to have exactly the same set of search functionality in all locations that I can search. I want to be able to sort by all of those fields, search by all of those fields, and search for any value that a field might have.

    That means:

    • In the Store search.
    • In the Library sidebar.
    • "Virtual categories" in the Library sidebar, which are basically "saved" searches that are re-invoked to build the category in the sidebar.
    • In Library "shelves".
    • When viewing lists of games available as part of a particular sale or promotion.
    • When viewing lists of games from a particular developer or publisher.
    • Any other places that I've missed.
15 comments