EA releases more evidence of its commitment to improving game accessibility

As part of its commitment to making games as accessible to as many people as possible, EA has committed to sharing 23 new patents with the entire industry through its accessibility portal.

The new patents include tools to help developers perform real-time photosensitivity testing, as well as improvements to speech and audio generation and recognition.

The patents include an Unreal Engine 5 plugin that uses EA’s photosensitivity analysis technology, IRIS, to “analyze and identify, in real time while running their games, frames that could potentially affect players experiencing photosensitivity.” .

Among the patents added this year are:

• Intelligent personalized voice recognition: Speech recognition system that improves the accuracy and efficiency of speech recognition by using personal phoneme assignments for each user, to better understand accent and other pronunciation variations, such as those resulting from speech problems.
• Generating expressive speech audio from text data: A system that generates expressive speech audio from text data and provides more control and customization of the generated speech based on the desired speaking style and speaker attributes.
• Generate voice in the voice of a video game player: A system that can generate speech in a player’s voice, for their avatar, based on minimal sample speech data compared to existing techniques.
• Voice aging using machine learning: A system that can age an original input voice to a desired target age without requiring additional voice samples.
• Emotion-based musical style change through deep learning: A system that infers a player’s emotion while playing a video game and adjusts the game‘s background soundtrack to best fit that emotion.
• Dynamically select voice functionality on client devices: A system that automatically detects and enables voice recognition technologies available on a gaming device.

“We believe gaming should be accessible to everyone, and our industry-leading teams are always looking for new ways to make that happen,” said Kerry Hopkins, senior vice president of global affairs at EA.

“By making this technology available to others, we continue to work to improve accessibility and inclusivity for gamers around the world by removing unwanted barriers to access.”

These latest patents come after EA “opened up” its accessibility tools and technology for “broader use to help players” in 2021. The first accessibility patent commitment included EA’s famous “ping” system. Apex Legends.

In a statement at the time, EA reiterated its commitment to inclusion by making its accessibility tools publicly available through open source.