Diablo IV to Include Over 50 Accessibility Features to Suit Player Needs
Blizzard Entertainment has outlined the many ways Diablo IV is prioritizing accessibility to help suit player needs, offering over 50 individual accessibility features including aids to dexterity, reading text, and vision.
As detailed in a blog post, lead accessibility designer Drew McCrory made it a point to construct accessibility features that struck a balance between being useful for players with disabilities and being careful not to mar gameplay for others.
Here are just a few accessibility features that players can expect when Diablo IV comes out:
- Customize your inputs for keyboard, mouse, or controller to your preferences and capabilities with Button Remapping.
- Enable Skill Toggle and Action Wheel Activation to transform the need to hold a button to cast a Skill to a simple toggle.
- Remap your analog sticks to one side of the controller to allow control with one hand.
- Enabling Persist Lock Target allows your skills and weapons to stay focused on an enemy.
- Subtitles are enabled by default on cinematics and players can choose to alter the font color, scaling, and the text’s background opacity based on preference.
- Using your device’s microphone, you can use our built-in Speech to Text software to transcribe what you’ve said into the chat.
- In-game text can be changed between 3 font size options – small, medium, and large. You can also resize your cursor.
- Audio cues will play when items drop from monsters and can be further fine-tuned to remove all audio cues from drops or only have cues play when gear of a certain type is dropped. Gear on the ground also has ambient audio cues to alert players that there are items to collect as well as alert the rarity of the item.
- Enable Player and Item Highlighting to increase readability on players, enemies, objects, and NPCs with a personally selected color highlight.
- Diablo IV contains a built-in screen reader and supports JAWS, NVDA, and other third-party screen reading software.
Diablo IV is scheduled to release on June 6, 2023 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, and PC.