EA says it will patent 23 accessibility technologies that will be available royalty-free to developers "to reduce or eliminate as many barriers to access as possible and empower our players."

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Electronic Arts (EA) has announced that it will patent 23 new technologies to make gaming more accessible to more people.
The new technologies will be made available industry-wide with no license fees or royalties.
Six of the 23 newly patented technologies are expected to hit the market later this year, including intelligent personalized speech recognition, the IRIS plug-in for Unreal Engine 5, and emotion-based music style change using deep learning.

With International Day of People with Disabilities just passed on December 3rd, some gaming companies have shared a glimpse into their recent efforts to remove barriers to make gaming more inclusive and accessible. Xbox recently shared its continued commitment by announcing new accessibility features and highlighting games with improved accessibility. Today, Electronic Arts (EA) also announces that it is doing its part to make gaming better for more gamers by announcing that it is adding 23 new patents to its patent promise.

Ping system on Apex Legends | Patent Promise – YouTube

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In 2021, EA announced an industry-first patent promise for accessibility technologies. In this commitment, the company announced that it would hold the patent for a range of technologies that could eliminate the barriers faced by people with different accessibility barriers. However, access to EA’s patented technology would be available industry-wide without royalties or royalties.

“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, SVP 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 unintended barriers to access.”

In addition to the new patents, EA will also release a plugin for Unreal Engine 5 that leverages IRIS, EA’s light sensitivity analysis technology. The IRIS plugin allows developers building their games in Unreal Engine 5 to analyze and identify frames in their games that could potentially impact players who suffer from light sensitivity.

Developers can use the IRIS plugin in real time while their game is running to detect flashes of luminance, flashes of red saturation, and spatial patterns that may prove harmful to players with photosensitive epilepsy or otherwise cause discomfort to the viewer.

EA's IRIS plugin is designed to detect photosensitivity-inducing flashes in games developed with Unreal Engine 5.

(Image credit: Electronic Arts (EA))

EA has also announced that six of the accessibility technologies that are part of the 23 patent roundup are expected to be available later this year. These include the following technologies:

Intelligent Personalized Speech Recognition: Speech recognition system that improves the accuracy and efficiency of speech recognition by using personal phoneme mappings for each user to better understand accents and other variations in pronunciation, for example due to speech impairments.
Generate expressive speech audio from text data: A system that generates expressive speech audio from text data, providing more control and personalization of the generated speech based on the desired speaking style and speaker attributes.
Generating Speech with a Video Game Player’s Voice: A system that can generate speech with 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 the need for additional voice samples.
Emotion-based musical style change using deep learning: A system that infers a player’s emotions while playing a video game and adjusts the game’s background soundtrack to best match that emotion.
Dynamic selection of voice functionality on client devices: A system that automatically detects and activates voice recognition technologies available on a gaming device.

EA’s previously patented accessibility technologies include Fonttik. Fonttik is a tool that identifies text in visual content and determines whether it meets certain size and contrast ratio criteria. This makes it easier to check whether the text can be read by players with different vision conditions. Apex Legends’ “Ping System” is another accessibility technology from EA that is widely used by an overwhelming number of players and has also become the standard for team games. Even titles like Call of Duty have introduced similar ping systems due to their success.

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EA says it will patent 23 accessibility technologies that will be available royalty-free to developers “to reduce or eliminate as many barriers to access as possible and empower our players.”

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