What this covers: which games lead on accessibility in 2026 and what they ship that others do not — full remapping and alternative input, subtitle and caption standards, difficulty as independent toggles rather than one slider, and screen-reader and menu narration. Every claim below comes from a publisher’s own options list or a named reviewer who tested the retail build. Why it matters: an accessibility claim is only as good as its menu. The games that lead are the ones that document their options, and the gap between them and the rest is visible in the lists, not the marketing. Who should care: players who need one specific option to play at all, and anyone buying a 2026 release on the strength of its accessibility page.
Accessibility had a clear reference document, and then it had a scoreboard. Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II shipped more than 60 settings in 2020, and its options list became the thing every later menu was read against. In 2026 the question is which releases kept up. The answer is not the games with the biggest accessibility budgets. It is the games whose menus let you change one thing without changing another, and whose publishers then published the full list so you could check before buying.
The 2026 leaderboard
| Surface | The Last of Us Part II | Forza Horizon 6 | Marvel’s Wolverine | EA Sports FC 27 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Remapping and alternative input | Every command remappable, touch-pad swipes included; right- and left-hand-only schemes | Controller remapping; up to five saved profiles | D-pad shortcuts replace simultaneous inputs such as L1+R1 | One- and two-button layouts; stick and shoulder-button menu remaps |
| Difficulty | Five independent channels, each Very Light→Survivor, plus Custom | Offline game speed; story advances regardless of race result | No-knockout option; global or combat-only game speed | Custom preset sliders for speed, shooting, passing, defending |
| Subtitles and captions | Story vs Story+Combat; size, names, direction arrow, colour | Size, background opacity, keyword highlight — no music captions | Three sizes, speaker colours, emotion and ambient descriptors on by default | Extra Small→Extra Large, colour, drop shadow, background |
| Screen reader / narration | Text-to-speech for on-screen text, plus an audio-cue glossary | Male and female voices; position and route announcements | Screen reader and audio descriptions | Menu narration (North American English only) |
The Last of Us Part II is the benchmark, not a 2026 release — but it is the column the later menus are still measured against. The other three are this year’s cases, and each leads a different way: Forza Horizon 6 in visual comfort, Wolverine in motor access, EA Sports FC 27 in menu discoverability.
Remapping is table stakes — alternative input is the split
Every serious accessibility menu now lets you move attack and action inputs. The differentiator is what it will not move.
AbleGamers named this the top of its “must have” list: remappable keys are “one of the three must have (along with close captioning and colorblind) options for minimal accessibility.” Its own guidance is blunt about why — once a developer decides which buttons are fixed, “if you physically can’t reach the keys designated by the developer there’s literally nothing you can do to play the game.”
The Last of Us Part II set the standard by refusing to fix anything. Naughty Dog’s list describes full control customisation allowing you to “remap every command to a different controller input, including touch pad swipes and controller shake,” plus dedicated Right Hand Only and Left Hand Only schemes and three custom profiles. It also converts effort, not just position: every hold becomes a toggle and every rapid press becomes a hold.
Forza Horizon 6 is the strongest racing example. Can I Play That records “a wide variety of button remapping” and up to five saved profiles, “so a whole family can tailor the control experience.” That matters in a genre where the default is a trigger-and-stick scheme that a player with limited grip may not be able to hold.
The alternative-input idea that deserves wider copying is Insomniac’s. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 introduced D-pad shortcuts as “a less physically taxing workaround” for simultaneous presses; Marvel’s Wolverine carries them forward, letting players “use it to activate Logan’s special moves and finishers, since both require simultaneous inputs.” A one-button macro for a two-button press is a smaller feature than a screen reader and does more for a player with one usable hand.
EA Sports FC 27 shows the trade-offs. It offers Classic, Alternate, Two Button and One Button schemes, and its remapping includes a Right Stick Remap that “allows you to navigate through all menu options with the Left Stick.” But EA’s own page carries a hard note: “Competitive Online games cannot be played using simplified One or Two Button Layouts.” Assistance is available, and it is walled off from ranked play — a pattern worth watching across 2026 releases.
Difficulty is a stack of switches, not a slider
The single most useful change of the last five years is that “difficulty” stopped being one dropdown. A player who needs longer to react is not the same as a player who needs less enemy damage, and the leading menus now let you say which you need.
The Last of Us Part II splits difficulty into Player, Enemies, Allies, Stealth and Resources, each on its own Very Light→Survivor scale, with the overall Challenge level adding a Custom option. Naughty Dog notes the point that still matters: “Trophies are not limited by difficulty.”
Celeste proved the model in an indie platformer. Its Assist Mode is a set of mixable tools rather than a mode: Game Speed down to 50%, Infinite Stamina, Air Dashes, Dash Assist, Invincibility and a chapter skip. The message the game shows when you enable it is a design statement in itself — “Assist Mode allows you to modify the game’s rules to fit your specific needs.” Nothing is disabled for using it.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 puts the same idea in an action game. Its Challenge Level Modifiers let you set Enemy Health, Enemy Damage and Stealth Awareness independently, and it assigns Game Speed values of “30%, 50%, and 70% of the real-time speed” to spare D-pad buttons. Wolverine adds a no-knockout option and lets you slow “the game speed on a global scale, or … the combat specifically.”
Two 2026 examples go further than tuning numbers. Forza Horizon 6 offers an option where “the story progresses regardless of race outcome” — an accessibility idea that is really a removal of a fail state — and an offline game speed setting. EA Sports FC 27 ships a Custom preset that exposes user and CPU sliders for Player Speed, Shooting, Passing, Injuries, Goalkeeping, Team Positioning, Ball Control and Defending.
Captions and subtitles carry the most-used options
Sony collected usage data on The Last of Us Part II and found something that reframes the whole category. As Sony’s Sam Thompson put it, “7 of the top 10 most utilized accessibility related options in the game were subtitle related.” Subtitle work is not a niche accommodation; on the best-documented AAA release of its era it was the most-used accessibility surface in the game.
The standard The Last of Us Part II set is still the checklist: subtitles at Off, Story Dialogue or Story + Combat Dialogue; three sizes; a background for legibility; speaker names; unique name colours; and a direction arrow “indicating the screen-relative direction of the person speaking.”
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 advanced the genre by separating captions from subtitles. Its 1.002 update added captions for non-speech sound with their own size, colour, background colour and opacity, alongside a separate subtitle set. Insomniac’s Sam Schaffel described them as covering “off-screen sounds, emotional music cues and key gameplay sounds.”
Forza Horizon is where the caption standard gets tested hardest, because the information is mechanical. Xbox’s Forza Horizon 5 page lists subtitles with font size, background opacity and keyword highlighting, and the Series 5 update added American Sign Language and British Sign Language interpreters as a picture-in-picture overlay during cinematics, with adjustable position and background colour. Forza Horizon 6 keeps the subtitle work and exposes more of it, but Can I Play That found the ceiling: “There are no captions for the music or engine sounds, which are two key parts of the experience.”
EA Sports FC 27 is thorough on presentation and narrow on scope: size from Extra Small to Extra Large, text colour, a drop shadow, a background bar and opacity — but EA’s page documents subtitles for “dialogue in the career mode Cinematic scenes,” not the match itself.
Screen reader and menu narration is the newest differentiator
If remapping is table stakes, narration is the frontier, and the distance between leaders here is still measured in years.
Sony Interactive calls The Last of Us Part II “the first AAA game that can be played start-to-finish by a visually impaired gamer.” Its text-to-speech narrates on-screen text, and the game ships an audio-cue glossary you can browse and listen to. That pairing — narration plus a documented cue library — is what a blind player needs to learn a game without sighted help.
Insomniac’s reader arrived later and went further into menus. Spider-Man 2’s 1.002 update added a Screen Reader that “reads aloud the text on the screen, and provides spoken guidance for navigating the menus,” covering everything from tutorials and settings to the map and skill tree, plus Audio Descriptions for cinematics. Wolverine inherits both; Can I Play That calls the result “the most thoroughly accessible game they’ve produced to date.”
Forza Horizon 6 is the notable 2026 advance: its screen reader “offers a variety of options with male and female voices” and can announce everything during a race, including position changes, or be limited to route progress. It also exposes menu-comfort settings the others do not: you can turn off moving backgrounds and use colour to distinguish menu options.
EA Sports FC 27 shows how a documented feature can still be a partial one. EA lists Menu Narration that “will read certain parts of the UI such as text in the highlighted tile, and menu items” — but only for North American English. Blind Gaming’s reading is the honest one: “The feature list is therefore most specific for low-vision players; it does not confirm full no-sight playability.”
The proof is the options list
The reason this audit cites publishers rather than marketing is that the accessibility claim and the accessibility documentation are now the same artifact. Microsoft’s own guidance treats this as a first-class requirement: the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines include “accessible feature documentation” and “accessible customer support” among their topics, alongside subtitles, screen narration, input and game difficulty.
That is the practical test for a 2026 purchase. EA publishes a full FC 27 settings list with the exact option values. Insomniac maintains a knowledge-base page for Spider-Man 2 and release notes that name the screen reader and audio descriptions. Naughty Dog published the Last of Us Part II list item by item. A game whose publisher cannot enumerate its options has not demonstrated that the options exist — and the ones that can are also the ones whose menus hold up under a reviewer’s inspection.
Where the 2026 leaders still lose
None of the leaders is finished, and the gaps are specific enough to name.
Forza Horizon 6 leaves its two most characteristic sounds undescribed — no music captions, no engine-roar captions — in a series built on both. Wolverine’s reviewer found the one combat decision it takes away: when the first tier of the rage meter fills, the healing factor triggers automatically at zero health, “regardless of whether you have the no knockout mode active,” which removes a player choice. EA Sports FC 27 limits menu narration to North American English and documents subtitles only for career cinematics. Celeste, the model for granular difficulty, offers no screen reader or audio description at all — Assist Mode addresses difficulty, not sight.
Read together, the 2026 picture is a genre-by-genre one. Racing leads on visual comfort and screen-reader depth. Action games lead on motor access and alternative input. Sports leads on making its own menu findable. Nobody leads everywhere, and for the fighting-game version of this audit, see how Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8 and Mortal Kombat 1 compare. One more thing travels across every genre: a forgiving input can compensate for a strict one, so the latency and controller story is still the floor these features stand on.
Next read
- Fighting Game Accessibility: SF6, Tekken 8, MK1 Compared — the same audit run on the three biggest fighters, where menu narration divides the field.
- Colorblind Modes Compared — Which 2026 Games Get It Right — the palette side of the visual-comfort problem, tested across RTSRTS. Real-Time Strategy — a strategy game where everyone plays at the same time, continuously, instead of taking turns. minimaps, ARPGARPG. Action RPG — an RPG with real-time combat rather than turn-based fights. loot and MMOMMO. Massively Multiplayer Online — a game that hosts very large numbers of players together in one shared, persistent world. mechanics.
- Input Latency and Accessibility: Controllers, Rollback — how display, controller and netcode delay stack up on a reduced-input mode.
- Input Lag, End to End: Mouse, Display, Engine — how each layer of the latency stack is measured, and what a millisecond costs.