EA Helps Disabled People Play their Games

Any historians among you who have an uncomfortable amount of knowledge about me would know that historically I’ve been an EA apologist. Not in that I ever thought the awful things they did were okay, but in that I didn’t think they were as bad as people let on: because yes, while they did do awful things routinely, they’re also one of the few game developers out there that seems to have something resembling a social conscious. In the past, that manifested as championing LGBT rights, and now, it’s with EA doing something most game developers haven’t even thought of:

Opening up a web portal specifically to help disabled people play games.

Accessibility is the correction of any mismatch between a person and their environment, including those resulting from medical differences. At EA, we feel it’s important to consider accessibility when making our games, so everyone can play.

The Accessibility portal is a convenient website that takes all the information a player might need in order to fully enjoy their game (even if they’re not fully able-bodied) in one convenient location. Anything from color blindness to motion sickness to a lack of coordination can be addressed and, presumably, solved on the website, allowing people to enjoy EA’s games without hassle.

Right now, the portal only has information for three of EA’s games, UFC 3, Madden NFL 18, and NHL 18, but there’s a Twitter account that will inform people of updates made on the portal, which will presumably include announcing when new games are added.

This is the kind of stuff that made it so hard for me to really buy into the full-blown EA hate that’s so gosh darn popular. And while I’m thinking nowadays EA is more of a “jerk with an occasional good spot” rather than “misunderstood good guy”, you can’t argue that this is a pretty cool thing. Hopefully other game companies follow suit, because we have no excuse not to help the disabled enjoy one of the best mediums in the world.