EA has made eight more accessibility patents free-to-use, making for a total of 46 since 2021.
Announced yesterday via EA’s official site, the patents include Grapple Assist, a technology used in the fighting game series EA Sports UFC, which simplifies grappling transitions and controls by automatically identifying and selecting the best transition from a single player input.
“The system allows a player to indicate their gameplay intent via a simplified input and then executes a corresponding complex command to accomplish the player’s desired intent,” EA Sports UFC senior software engineer and inventor on the patent Hendrik Blok said in the announcement. “It’s not about altering the core gameplay, but about interpreting intent so players with different needs, abilities, or skills can engage more easily.”
Alongside Grapple Assist are expressive speech audio generation, robust speech audio generation, and speech prosody prediction. These technologies aim to enhance voice generation by providing for more expressive and contextual speech, and allow developers to integrate narration or feedback into experiences that otherwise would have no or limited audible voice.
Moreover, EA is open-sourcing improvements to accessibility tool Fonttik by adding new color-blindness simulation filters to the existing text size and contrast analysis technology.
“The goal is not to be the only company that shares its accessibility technologies,” EA senior counsel for AI, patents, and technology Santiago Velez said in the announcement. “The goal is to spur more innovation sharing for the greater good of players and the industry.”
EA is one of the founding members of the Accessible Games Initiative started this year
During GDC 2025, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) launched the Accessible Games Initiative, with the goal of providing players with clear information about accessibility features in video games.
The founding members of the initiative include Microsoft, Nintendo of America, Google, and EA, who all pledged to leverage new accessibility tags to better support players.
“Tens of millions of Americans have a disability and often face barriers to experiencing the joy and connection that comes with playing video games,” said ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis at the time.
Since then, Ubisoft has open-sourced its internal color blindness simulation tool, called Chroma, to allow devs to meet the accessibility needs of people with the condition. Said tool is capable of simulating live gameplay up to 60fps and isn’t dependent on a specific engine.
Aside from the initiative’s founding members, companies like Steam and Godot have announced and implemented plans around accessibility. The former has added the option for users to search for games based on accessibility features, which became available in June, while the latter ushered in accessibility features into the engine, including screen reader support.
In other EA-related news, the company has said that it will retain “creative control” under new private owners, which include the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, PIF—despite the fact that PIF will own 93.4 percent of EA after the buyout.
The company stated that the $55 billion take-private won’t result in “immediate” layoffs. Meanwhile, EA CEO Andrew Wilson earned 260 times more than the company’s median worker last year.
