PlayStation 5 Comes With State-of-the-Art Accessibility Features

The gaming community is all-inclusive, with people from all walks of life, regardless of their physical, economic, or social status. Therefore, the developers of companies spearheading the industry work on their products keeping in this mind this diversity. Hence, with the launch of next-gen PlayStation 5, Sony has included various state-of-the-art accessibility features to make the console more accessible for a significant part of the gaming community.

Sony Interactive Entertainment’s recent blog post dives into this issue. It talks about all the accessibility features in the PS5 as well as their advantages. It also talks about how the company and its partners are working towards creating a much safer and inclusive environment for specially abled people.

The all-new PlayStation 5 has ‘voice-diction’ feature and support for multiple languages

The PS5 has all the accessibility features that Sony previously added in the PS4. These include text to speech, inverting colors, and enabling custom button assignments. While these are the basic feature available on almost all technological devices, the PS5 aims to go a step further.

According to the blog, the next-gen PlayStation from Sony “will offer a voice dictation feature to quickly input text without the use of a virtual keyboard. Simply speak the words and they’ll appear on-screen. Screen Reader provides blind and low vision users with options to hear on-screen text, while deaf and hard of hearing users can type text messages, which will be spoken out loud to other party members. These features will now support multiple languages on PS5 globally.” \

These languages include English(US), English(UK), Japanese, German, Italian, France French, Canadian French, Spanish, and Latin American.

In addition to these features, the console also has accessibility features with regards to the new DualSense controller. Since the all-new controller features haptic-feedback, a lot of players might feel a difficulty with the vibrations. Therefore, they will be able to control and change the levels of this feedback.

Sony is creating a more ‘able’ environment with its partners and in the company

Sony is also encouraging developers to make games that have accessibility features to ensure close to everyone can enjoy their games as well as the console. The perfect example for this was Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 4 on the PS4. However, they have outdone themselves with Last of Us II. The game will have around 60 accessibility settings as the team works to better understand the needs of all gamers.

Apart from the developers, Sony has also launched a program called ‘ABLE@PlayStation’. Under the program, staff at the company works with leading expert accessibility consultants. This ensures sensitivity training for the staff working behind the consoles.

Sony recognizes the vibrant community behind its products and therefore is working hard to deliver exceptional experiences to all.