Electronic Arts has made eight patents in the field of gaming accessibility publicly available
Now patented technologies can be used by all interested developers.
Specifically, Electronic Arts (EA) has opened up several technologies for speech recognition and generation in games. Most notably among these is a patent for the Grapple Assist system from EA Sports UFC, which simplifies controls in fighting games by automatically selecting the most advantageous move based on the player's behavior and executing it with a single button press.
In addition, EA released the source code for Fonttik on GitHub—an analysis tool for text size and contrast in games, enabling accessibility for people with visual impairments.
EA explained that all this has been done as part of the Accessibility First Patent Pledge initiative. To recall, the company launched this initiative back in 2021 when it first opened access to several of its patents on technologies for people with disabilities. Since then, EA has made 46 such patents available online.