What this covers: a side-by-side audit of the accessibility surfaces in Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8 and Mortal Kombat 1 — colour-vision filtering and colour-dependent UI, text and HUD scaling, full control remapping (including leverless and one-handed layouts), difficulty and assist options, and tutorial depth. Why it matters: these three games set the genre’s baseline. MK1 and Tekken 8 shipped dedicated accessibility menus; SF6 did not, and its strongest features sit under the audio options instead. Scope: every option below comes from a publisher page or a named accessibility reviewer who tested the retail build. Where a feature is missing, that is stated as an absence from the sources, not inferred from a screenshot.
Fighting games put every accessibility decision under time pressure. A missable menu is survivable in an RPGRPG. Role-Playing Game — a game built around character progression, story, and player choices.; a colour you cannot read, or a button you cannot reach, costs you the round. Capcom, Bandai Namco and NetherRealm each answered that pressure differently, and the differences are larger than the marketing suggests.
Two of the three shipped a menu literally called Accessibility. The third did not. That single fact shapes the rest of this comparison.
The comparison table
| Surface | Street Fighter 6 | Tekken 8 | Mortal Kombat 1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Colour-vision profiles | None documented; approach is HUD customisation + brightness | Colour perception type: colour-blind profiles and high-contrast variants, intensity slider | Protanopia, Deuteranopia, Tritanopia presets, adjustable intensity |
| Text / HUD scaling | Battle HUD adjustable or switchable off | HUD elements repositionable; separate UI and fight brightness sliders | Health bars can be lowered toward screen centre |
| Remapping scope | Combat buttons only — stick and movement cannot be remapped | Full button customisation; combos can map to one press | Gameplay inputs remappable, but only face/shoulder buttons listed; menus excluded |
| Simplified input scheme | Modern (assisted combos) and Dynamic (AI auto-combo) | Special Style | Input Shortcuts, Button Shortcuts |
| Screen-reader / menu narration | No menu narration; stage and character-select narration only | No menu narration (reviewer-tested) | Full menu narration, offered at first launch |
| Descriptive audio | None | None | Story cinematics, Fatalities and Fatal Blows |
| Gameplay audio cues | Distance, cross-up, high/mid/low, Vitality/SA, Drive gauge | Distinct per-character attack sounds; stereo-positioned voices | Six cue types toggleable via four audio presets |
| Subtitles | On by default; opacity slider; no size control | On/off only; presentation varies by mode | On by default; size adjustable at launch |
| Tutorial depth | Character guides + World Tour; not narrated | Arcade Quest, video tutorials, Super Ghost Battles | Extensive, re-accessible, with demos and fatality practice |
Colour: filters versus colour-dependent UI
Mortal Kombat 1 treats colour as a UI problem. Its official feature list states that the colourblind presets “edit user interface (UI) and heads-up display (HUD) elements that might not be accessible to all in their original colors”, with presets for Protanopia, Deuteranopia and Tritanopia and adjustable intensity. Because health bars, meter and damage numbers are the information you actually act on, filtering the UI is where the leverage is.
Tekken 8 took a broader and more contested route. Its dedicated accessibility menu contains a single option, “colour perception type”, and per Can I Play That’s review there are two families of filter: one overlays the whole game with colour-blindness profiles, the other adds high contrast as well, and either can be scaled with an intensity slider. Enabling any profile disables HDR and brightness settings — a limitation worth knowing before you hunt for a missing slider.
That same filter set produced the genre’s most publicised accessibility argument. One striped, black-and-white profile drew reports of migraines, vertigo and seizure risk; Ars Technica documented the concern, and Kotaku reported that Bandai Namco’s Katsuhiro Harada confirmed some options would be retuned for both the retail game and the demo. Harada also pushed back at the time, writing that the game has “multiple types of color vision options” and that the settings were “still being researched”. The episode is a useful reminder that an accessibility feature can itself create a hazard for a different impairment.
Street Fighter 6 is the outlier: none of the sources reviewed here list a dedicated colour-vision filter. Its visual accommodation is structural rather than corrective — the battle HUD “can be adjusted or completely turned off if preferred”, alongside a brightness slider under the Display tab. For a game whose super-move overlays are deliberately noisy, removing HUD clutter is a real option, but it is not the same as making a specific colour readable.
Text, HUD and scaling
Text size is the quietest gap. MK1’s launch-day listing, reproduced by GameSpew, states that “Users can also modify the subtitle size”, and it presents subtitles on by default across Story mode and pre-fight dialogue. Tekken 8, by contrast, lets you turn subtitles on or off and nothing else — Can I Play That flags this as “especially problematic since characters speak different languages”, and notes the subtitle style changes between Story Mode and Arcade Quest.
Street Fighter 6 sits between them. Subtitles are on automatically in all three modes and there is a background-opacity slider, but Can I Play That found “there isn’t a way to change the subtitle size” and that fighter intros are not subtitled at all. HUD control is where SF6 leads: the battle HUD is adjustable or removable, and World Tour’s minimap size and rotation can be changed.
Controls: remapping, leverless and one-handed
All three games let you move attack inputs. The differences are in what you cannot move.
Street Fighter 6 offers the deepest profile system: three control types, five saved button profiles each, for 15 per player, plus a Test option. But GameAccess is explicit that “you cannot remap the joystick and movement options. You can only remap the inputs required to perform combat actions.” It adds two motor features worth naming — separate left and right stick deadzones (for World Tour and Battle Hub navigation, not fights) and “Button Release Input”, the negative-edge setting that reads press and release as separate activations.
Tekken 8 allows full button customisation and lets any button combination collapse to a single press, but Can I Play That found the controller-customisation menu is the one screen that still requires the D-pad, and that the left stick, used for movement in fights, cannot be programmed as an input at all.
Mortal Kombat 1 is the most restrictive on paper. Its official list says “All gameplay inputs can be customized and remapped to a different button input. Remapping controls cannot be applied to menu navigation”, then names only the four face and four shoulder buttons against the eight combat actions. Movement remapping is not described.
That last point matters most for one-handed play. AbleGamers’ guidance for gaming with one hand is that the challenge is “trying to replace one entire side of buttons”, and its recommended answers are hardware, not software: adaptive hubs with switches such as the Xbox Adaptive Controller or Hori Flex, standalone one-handed controllers, and 3D-printed mounts. None of these three fighters ships a one-handed layout mode, so a one-handed player is combining an external device with whatever the game will let them rebind — and in SF6 and MK1, movement is the input left standing. For the control-scheme side of that equation, see how SF6’s three control types map to archetypes.
A leverless controller is a simpler case: because it presents as a standard controller to the console, all three titles accept it without a special mode. The catch is the same remapping ceiling — if the game will not let you move a movement input, the leverless layout has to do the work.
Difficulty, assists and tutorials
The assist layer is the genre’s biggest accessibility lever, because it attacks execution rather than presentation.
Street Fighter 6 is the most aggressive. Modern Controls reduce specials to a button plus a direction and add assisted combos; the assisted specials deal 20% less damage to protect competitive integrity, though classic motion inputs for the same move are unaffected. Dynamic Controls go further, using AI to pick a combo from a single button based on distance, but they are limited to certain Fighting Ground modes and cannot be used online. Difficulty lives in Arcade Story (Easiest through Hardest), and offline Versus adds the Advantage menu’s five-star handicap. For how far the assist floor stretches, see the execution floor rankings for Tekken 8’s beginner cast.
Tekken 8’s equivalent is Special Style: Can I Play That describes it as simplifying “all fighting inputs down to face buttons”, automatable combos, toggled with one press, with “no penalty for using it across all modes” and characters auto-blocking regular attacks while standing still. Round length and rounds-to-win are also adjustable, which the reviewer found useful “for dealing with fatigue”. Arcade Quest provides built-in tutorials, video demonstrations and Super Ghost Battles with replay takeover.
Mortal Kombat 1 splits its assistance into discrete toggles rather than a control scheme: Input Shortcuts “lessen the directional precision required for special moves”, Button Shortcuts collapse multi-button inputs to single presses, and a Test Your Might toggle removes the rapid mashing in those Story segments. The tutorial suite is re-accessible at will, most segments include an input-and-timing demonstration, and fatality practice disables the timer constraint.
What is still missing
Three gaps stand out across all three games.
Menu narration is the largest. MK1 is the only one of the three with a built-in screen reader, and it guides players to it on first launch. Can I Play That’s SF6 review calls the absence “a huge obstacle for blind players, who would have to have sighted assistance to help them get into a fight”. SightlessKombat reached the same conclusion for Tekken 8, where “there is no menu narration” and even the accessibility entry itself is hard to locate without OCR or help. The gap is being filled from outside the publishers: the community sf6Access project, whose June 2026 release notes describe reading guide text and filling in “the button glyphs the screen reader cannot see”, exists precisely because SF6 has no built-in narration.
Descriptive audio is the second. MK1 narrates “all Story cinematics, Fatalities, and Fatal Blows”; neither SF6 nor Tekken 8 offers a documented equivalent, and Tekken 8’s multi-language story is the mode the SightlessKombat review found least usable without it.
Colour-dependent UI is the third, and it is the one where the three diverge most sharply — a full profile system in Tekken 8 and MK1, and nothing documented in SF6. Read together, the genre’s accessibility is strongest where someone wrote a menu for it and weakest wherever a decision was left to a separate options screen. It is also worth remembering that all three are live-service titles whose option lists have been patched since launch; the surfaces above are the ones their publishers and reviewers have published, not the whole of what a current build contains. And because a cue you cannot hear in time is no cue at all, the netcode underneath these features still matters — input latency, controllers and rollback remains the floor everything else stands on.
Next read
- Street Fighter 6: How to Choose a Main — the control-type and archetype decision that Modern and Dynamic assist sit on top of.
- Tekken 8 Beginner Character Tier List: Execution Floor — which fighters forgive execution and which punish it, the practical companion to Special Style.
- Input Latency in Fighting Games: Pads, Displays, Rollback — why input latency and rollback behaviour decide whether an audio or visual cue arrives in time.