Electronic Arts’ accessibility innovations span a variety of genres. From Apex Legends’ ping system to Dead Space’s content warning and censorship options, disabled players have access to a variety of tools to make games work better for them across EA’s library. On September 26 of last year, EA released EA Sports FC 26, the latest entry in the football (soccer) series, complete with a bevy of new accessible designs and options. And the disabled community noticed.
Within several months of its release, FC 26 secured nominations for awards in shows like The Game Awards’ Innovation in Accessibility Award and IGN’s The Best Accessible Games of 2025, and it won at the Game Accessibility Conference’s AAA Excellence and Greatest Accessibility Innovation awards. Through drawing inspiration from past EA titles (as well as the gaming industry at large), discussing the occasional difficulties of creating accessible innovations, and exploring their future hopes for accessibility across the industry, the developers behind FC 26 created one of the publisher’s most accessible games to date. Here’s a closer look at just what makes this feat so impressive, and how the team behind FC 26 accomplished it.
Looking to Others
Accessibility is frequently built upon the successes and failures of other games, both internally and across other external studios. It’s not uncommon to see an accessible setting or design take inspiration from a different game, different genre, or even a previous entry in a series. Paul Parsons, gameplay producer for EA Sports FC, and Morgan Baker, accessibility development director at EA, explained that this back-and-forth is part of how studios create a “comprehensive review” of features and push accessibility forward.
“It’s kind of hard not to be inspired by other titles, since that’s the language of accessibility mechanics,” Parsons said. “Any time you speak with someone from the disabled community about what features they are looking for, they won’t hesitate to give you a rundown on what worked where and why, so it’s only natural that we’d follow up and look to see what it is about those features that resonated. Beyond that, we also did a comprehensive review of accessibility features in sports titles to get an idea of where we stood.”
In FC 26, settings such as Text-to-Speech–which help convey written messages through voice–are crucial for blind and low-vision players, and varying filters help players who deal with different forms of colorblindness. Assists for actions like shooting, passing, and goaltending either simplify these moves or allow the game to perform them automatically, which is perfect for players with limited reach or strength.
Searching for accessibility answers within other titles is important, but Baker acknowledged that FC 26’s accessibility success is a direct result of involving the disabled community in its development. While developers understand the intricacies of implementing options and designs, disabled players are the authority on understanding how it impacts their gameplay. It’s one thing to include a feature like customizable controls, but it’s another to know how a physically disabled player will make those controls their own.
“[W]e built upon previous entries by using industry-wide standards and bringing in players with lived experiences to help us understand what to prioritize,” Baker said. “When there is so much to do, it is easy to become overwhelmed. By tapping into our FC Accessibility Design Council, made up of disabled gamers and consultants with years of football experience, we were able to lock in as a team to create a clear focus and vision.”
Accessibility Isn’t Always Easy
Despite most games featuring accessible settings or designs, the implementation of those features takes time and occasionally creates developmental hardships. Some developers begin the design process with a specific vision, but as Parsons noted, “One of the cruel realities of game development is that you never get to ship the game you wanted to make.”
Thankfully, for Parsons, that wasn’t the case.
For FC 26, this meant forgoing some accessibility features that Parsons said he hopes will be added in the future, instead focusing efforts on the now award-winning and industry first competitive High Contrast Mode (HCM). Yet, as Parsons explained, FC 26’s HCM is not what was originally intended. Rather, what players experience now is the culmination of testing, refining, and ultimately transforming this crucial setting.
“[Our] original vision was quite conservative: change the player color, desaturate the pitch,” he said. “As we kept going, we kept on thinking of more ways to improve the mode, whether that be through removing shadows, only shading the kit, removing mow pattern, and so on. At some point we simply decided that we wanted to have the best HCM possible, full stop. It may be the only time in my career where I had a feature start simple and ship as the deluxe version of an idea.”
The challenge of implementing HCM was twofold–developers needed to ensure the feature was functional within off-line modes, and that it also afforded disabled players the tools to comfortably compete in player-vs.-player environments. When enabled, you can choose different colors at varying saturation levels that highlight objects on the screen. From the home team and its corresponding goal, to the away team and its goal, to even the color of the ball itself, blind and low vision players can confidently access important visual information on the screen.
From a design perspective, Parsons noted that multiple teams needed to work “in parallel” to ensure HCM could function at launch. From rendering, to the stadium team, to the front-end team focusing on the interface of the setting, every developer worked together. As a result, the team decided to try for an industry first: a competitive accessibility setting, one that set out to defy the myth that accessibility gives people a distinct advantage.
“When it comes to the implementation of HCM into PvP, we decided early on to prioritize fact over speculation,” he said. “It was a fact that HCM in PvP would make a massive difference for our players, while the arguments against its inclusion were purely speculative in nature, so we decided to go for it. We knew we’d be the first ones taking that step, and if anything untoward came out of it we’d go from innovators to being a cautionary tale in a heartbeat.”
Industry Firsts and the Future of Accessibility
Innovation, especially in accessibility, can be a daunting thought. With the individualistic nature of the disabled experience, not every option or design is going to be beneficial to everyone, and pushing to add new modes could lead to the idea that unforeseen consequences could unbalance the game. Combine that with hardware and software limitations, and developers may be afraid to push beyond traditional accessibility offerings, instead defaulting to classic features like customizable controls and subtitles. Yet, for Parsons, this fear of the unknown is what’s most enticing. And competitive PvP accessibility may become the new innovative frontier for the entire games industry.
“Right now, we’ve discovered a lot of levers you can pull to make a single-player game more accessible, but many of them don’t work in multiplayer because time and world state must stay consistent for everyone,” he said. “To me, that’s the most fertile ground for innovation. Of course, I hope FC is on the forefront of that, but if someone ‘beats’ us to the release of an interesting accessibility mechanic, I really don’t mind. The player wins, and that’s what’s important.”
Understanding and implementing accessibility is a continuous process, and the disabled community remains at the forefront of these innovations. What started as merely options in menus has since evolved into core game design mechanics combined with complementary settings. Baker said her hope is that the industry moves beyond “accommodations,” instead adopting accessible and inclusive designs throughout development stages, particularly at the beginning–and that the industry continues to share knowledge as it develops these features As games like FC 26 continue to innovate and revolutionize accessibility, disabled players are best served when other studios can learn from the successes and mistakes of new features like HCM for PvP.
“I also hope we continue sharing knowledge across studios and publishers,” Baker said. “No single company owns accessibility, and progress accelerates when we build on each other’s ideas rather than reinventing the wheel. Standards, research, tooling, and best practices should be collaborative efforts, because ultimately, accessibility isn’t about checking a box. It’s about making games better for everyone.”