A brand new feature from Xbox allows for people who are hearing or speech impaired to allow them to effectively communicate with their friends. The new Xbox feature allows players to turn on both text-to-speech and speech-to-text for party chat, giving a new level of accessibility to the platform beyond just in-game settings.

The gaming industry has been gradually making everything more and more accessible and although there's more work to be done, it's a step in the right direction. Xbox released its adaptive controller in 2018, giving first-party support to impaired gamers. There is a lot of various pieces of third-party hardware to help meet various needs, but the adaptive controller was one of the first from an actual platform holder, encouraging developers to build their games with the controller in mind. Xbox will be taking it a step further with a new update.

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Xbox has introduced a new way to communicate via new text-to-speech and speech-to-text options. The features are currently only available for Xbox Insiders but will make their way to everyone in the near future. The text-to-speech option translates what players are saying into an adjustable overlay on the screen and the speech-to-text option reads text messages back to the party. Eligible players can enable this under the "Ease of Access" menu in the Xbox settings.

Xbox Accessibility Settings

Developers like Naughty Dog have made huge strides in accessibility, adding incredibly in-depth settings that cater to a variety of impairments across the board from customizable difficulty settings to even assisting blind gamers. It shows that gaming is becoming more inclusive and there are large-scale efforts to ensure the ever-evolving medium won't hold back many people. It seems likely that Xbox will continue to dig deeper and deeper into innovating its accessibility offerings in various ways, hopefully signaling to developers and platform holders like Nintendo to also do the same.

These system-wide features are incredibly important and given Xbox's massively talented team, it wouldn't be surprising if the company is able to expand its support into visual assistants to help blind players. With accessibility through features, dropping Xbox paywalls, and more, it's great to see such a huge company helping lead the charge on such a big and crucial initiative that will hopefully have a ripple effect on the entire industry at large. After seeing the innovations made last generation, it'll be fascinating to see what companies like Xbox are able to achieve by the end of this generation.

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Source: Xbox