Ubisoft recently announced that Brawlhalla will now feature real-time captioning to improve accessibility for its more than 80 million players. The publisher will be collaborating with speech recognition company Speechmatics to incorporate the feature across all of its livestreams, esports tournaments, and developer streams.
According to Ubisoft, the closed captions follow the CEA-608 standard and will be supported by a significant number of Over The Top services including popular platforms like Twitch and YouTube. The closed captions will work seamlessly on most devices including mobile phones and can be activated by simply selecting the Closed Captions option at the bottom of the image.
Although the current system only supports English, Ubisoft has "future ambitions to roll out the service to anyone, anywhere, and at any time.” The custom dictionary will also enable the developer to add words to a stream on demand, making it much easier to feature characters and locations.
Chief Executive Officer at Speechmatics Katy Wigdahl praised the potential of the games industry to lead the way on accessibility, noting how there has already been significant progress with a wide range of adaptive controllers and display options available for most games and platforms. "As an industry that is bigger than Hollywood and the music industry combined, there is no doubt that gaming has huge potential to lead the way on accessibility," Wigdahl explained.
"We are delighted to be working with Ubisoft, with many of the Speechmatics team growing up playing its games. It’s an organization that has an outstanding track record on accessibility,” Wigdahl added. “We look forward to helping them continue to make gaming and streaming as inclusive as possible."
The addition of real-time captioning in Brawlhalla is being celebrated by the community as a step forward in accessibility. The move highlights the importance of inclusivity in the games industry, something which is growing rapidly and has been showing no signs of slowing down.