Steam to Roll Out New Accessibility Support Search Feature

Valve announced that the Steam store and desktop client will soon allow users to search for games based on accessibility features, including narrated menus, customizable subtitle options, chat speech-to-text, color alternatives, and more.

This new feature is aimed at enhancing the user experience for gamers with disabilities and is expected to roll out later in 2025. Valve encourages developers to start entering detailed accessibility information about their games through Steamworks, the platform’s developer toolkit. The company has also launched a new accessibility-support questionnaire to help developers clearly define how their games accommodate various needs.

The questionnaire will guide developers within Steamworks to identify key features like gameplay adjustments (e.g., adjustable difficulty), audio (such as custom volume controls and narrated game menus), visual options (including text size and color adjustments), and input features like speech-to-text.

While the addition of accessibility tags to game pages is not a requirement, Valve is urging developers to take advantage of this new tool. For players, once the update is fully implemented, accessibility information will be available directly on game store pages.

Steam is a digital distribution service and storefront that was developed and launched by Valve in September 2003. As of early 2025, Steam’s catalog includes approximately 105,000 games and software titles. In 2024 alone, Steam saw a record-breaking influx of nearly 19,000 new game releases. On March 2, 2025, Steam hit its highest-ever number of concurrent users, 40 million.