Electronic Arts has once again made good on a promise to support inclusivity and accessibility in the games industry. Recently, the company unlocked 23 patents tied to accessibility, including speech recognition and photosensitivity innovations. In 2021, the team pledged to share in-house technology with the wider industry.
Sharing is Caring
On December 5, Electronic Arts made 23 patents open-source, making them available to third-party developers operating outside of EA. These patents mostly concern speech-based technology and testing tools that recognise photosensitivity issues.
One key deliverable is an Unreal Engine 5 plugin that unlocks EA’s IRIS technology, an analytical tool that can help developers identify photosensitivity issues in their game while testing. It’s now free to use and open-source, which means developers are free to ‘play around’ with the software.
In a post on EA’s blog, it was said:
For years now, EA has strived to make gaming as inclusive as possible and to minimize barriers between our players and our shared love for video games. And today, in this spirit and following International Day of Persons with Disabilities we have added 23 accessibility-centered patents to our industry-first accessibility patent pledge.
Through this pledge, launched in 2021, we share our accessibility-related technology with the wider industry royalty-free, so that together we can work towards meeting the needs of our diverse gaming community at EA and beyond.
IRIS works by identifying potential issues in a game such as flashing lights and sequences that could trigger something like an epileptic fit or seizure. It compares visuals against a simple baseline that tracks in real-time, assessing whether a sequence is a pass, warning, or fail.
Previously, EA has delivered patents focused on text issues, such as Fontikk, a tool that was open-sourced in 2022 that analyses text to determine its readability.
Do you think this is a good move by EA, or is it just a ploy to earn some positive PR? Let us know on the GPlayr forum.
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