Forza Motorsport’s impressive accessibility options will even help blind players race
Turn 10 Studios is still hard at work developing the next generation Forza Motorsport, but it dropped an interesting update today regarding the game’s accessibility features. The highly-anticipated racing sim title will come with a range of settings to adjust the experience to any player’s liking, but the most major new additions seem to be its Blind Driving Assists and One Touch Driving features.
As the video below shows off, blind or low vision players will be able to enjoy the racer using especially crafted audio cues. Once they are accustomed to the cues, which can be previewed in-game via the accessibility settings menu, Turn 10 says that it can be a game-changer for low/no vision racers.
“Blind Driving Assists also provides players with audible information about their position and orientation on track, approach and progress through turns, as well as information about the car, such as how much deceleration is needed, when to shift (if playing with manual transmission) and more,”explains the studio.
Meawnhile, One Touch Driving lets anyone pick up the game and play with “whatever amount and combination of inputs you need.”Built with mobility and stamina disabilities in mind, the feature lets players reduce the number of simultaneous inputs that’s required to drive their favorite vehicles.
Here’s a list of accessibility options Forza Motorport will have, including the two aformentioned features:
- Blind Driving Assists: Blind and Low Vision players can use informational audio content during gameplay that will help them navigate tracks, improve their lap times, and complete races. Players will be able to enable each set of cues individually as well as adjust their pitch and volume to best suit their needs.
- One Touch Driving: Players have the option to choose their own combination of enabling braking, steering, and throttle assists to reduce the number of simultaneous inputs required. These driving assists will allow users to customize their driving experience and play with as few or as many assists as they wish.
- Screen Narrator: Players can enable narrator to receive information conveyed through the UI and to help navigate menus. In addition, there will be options for players to customize the narration system, offering new flexibility to choose what information is conveyed.
- Dynamic Audio Description: Players will have in-game cinematics with custom audio descriptions that change based on time of day and weather conditions.
- Text-to-Speech/Speech-to-Text: Players can utilize these options to participate in multiplayer voice chat to send synthesized voice to other players using text-to-speech or view incoming communication from other players in text form, utilizing speech-to-text.
- UI Colorblindness Modes: Players with tritanopia, deuteranopia, or protanopia can change certain colors in the UI theme so that UI information and focus states can be easily distinguished, as desired.
- World Colorblindness Filters: Players with tritanopia, deuteranopia, or protanopia can add a filter to the rendering of 3D objects like tracks, cars, drivers, in-game cinematics, etc. to make color information distinguishable, as desired.
- Controller Remapping: Gameplay controls can be remapped through the settings, offering additional flexibility to a players’ desired control scheme.
- Subtitles: Players can enable subtitles, as well as adjust subtitle font size and subtitle background opacity.
- Audio Customization Settings: Players are able to independently customize the volume of various groups of sounds to create their preferred audio experience.
- Opponent Difficulty: Players can customize opponent driving levels when racing with AI.
- Text Scaling: Players can adjust their menu text to various scaling options. In-game HUD will also have some re-sizing support.
- Contrast: Players can raise the contrast for UI and HUD elements from the default to varying additional tiers, each providing higher contrast ratios to improve readability.
- Moving Backgrounds: Players can disable moving backgrounds, making it easier to read or navigate menus.
Described as a reboot for the franchise, Forza Motorsport does not have a firm release attached to it yet. The title is coming to PC, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox Cloud Gaming, as well as Xbox and PC Game Pass subscription services sometime in 2023.
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