This brings to sixteen the number of patents that Electronic Arts has made freely available (open source).

In 2021, Electronic Arts released five patents as part of the Accessibility First Patent Pledge. With these, the publisher, led by Andrew Wilson, aims to make accessibility more feasible. In December 2022, it added six more patents, and last December it open-sourced its Iris light sensitivity analysis tool. Now the publisher has added four more, according to company vice president Farah Ali. The goal is clear: to make games more accessible to players with disabilities or medical conditions.

Automated Player Control Taker detects when a user stops interacting with a title and converts the character into a system run that resembles the player’s playing style. The adaptive game tutorial system allows users to receive tailored advice on in-game commands to help reduce their barriers to playing a title.

The route navigation system aims to improve cognitive and visual accessibility by creating navigation directions and display help lines for players who have difficulty navigating large worlds. Finally, there’s an animated and personalized video game coach. Ali said, “Through an animated and personalized coach, players receive in-game and out-of-game insights to improve their performance, making it easier to implement the insights and ultimately maximize their enjoyment of the game.”

Sony Interactive Entertainment also offers many accessibility options in almost all of their games, so Electronic Arts is not the only one doing this. In any case, this is a good gesture on the part of the company. Hopefully more people will take advantage of the technology that Electronic Arts provides, because it’s fun to play, and the more people who play, the more people can temporarily forget about some of their problems.

The more we see that happening, the more the industry will be willing to do it.

Source: Gamesindustry, Electronic Arts