Forza Horizon 5 Accessibility Supports Sign Language, Game Speed, More

Forza Horizon 5, the highly anticipated open world racing game, is only hours away from officially releasing. And in those final moments, the games creative director has given us a look at the game's surprisingly inclusive accessibility options.

Mike Brown, the aforementioned creative director for Playground Games (Forzas developer), recently detailed the various accessibility options in Horizon 5 in an Xbox Wire blog post. With an accompanying video, we get a look at common settings like colorblindness, subtitles, and font size. What stood out, however, where the less common settings, like notification duration, static backgrounds, and even sign language support.



The developers used a combination of the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines and feedback from the disability community when considering what kind of features to support and focus on. This resulted in some helpful, but not often considered features like ASL and BSL support (When enabled, a live action model will appear during cutscenes, translating any dialogue into American or British Sign Language).

We noticed that a number of the settings offered are based around the idea of focus. With the option to remove dynamic backgrounds, players can help reduce over stimulation when trying to parse out information in the menus. Extending the notification duration would allow more time for people to properly process the info theyre trying to provide. And my personal favorite: an option to reduce the game engine speed. Players can slow down the game engine, allowing more time to react to high-speed scenarios while racing, but without reducing the snappy responsiveness of the game menus.

All in all, were happy to see major publishers give big name titles more attention to accessibility. Gaming should be for everyone, and efforts like this help make that happen.