The voice and text communication service Discord announced last week that it has added a new accessibility menu that can be accessed through settings. This change should be live for all users.
Announced through Twitter, Discord announced that users can now access accessibility options through user settings. The tweet highlights the available features, which isn’t that much, but it is a start. Those features being reduced motion and text-to-speech.
On jumping into the application and checking it out, the options for reduced motion reduces elements of the application such as mouse hover and other fancy animations throughout its interface.
While users can sync the animations with their computer settings, there are toggle options for enabling reduced motion, enabling auto-playing of GIFs, and automatically playing animated emojis. Stickers are also listed with the user being given the choice to have them animated all the time, animated only on interaction, or never animated.
For text-to-speech, there’s one toggle that allows the user to allow playback and make use of the text-to-speech command.
We also saw Sony Interactive Entertainment implement voice chat control for parties in a recent system update for the PS5 which runs similarly to Discord’s voice chat controls. And yesterday, SIE announced a partnership with Discord, however, it doesn’t seem to include accessibility improvements, as of yet.
It’s nice to see Discord offering a dedicated accessibility menu, and hopefully, we’ll see more features added down the line. I’m personally hoping to see a live caption feature on par with Google Meet’s live captions that break each users dialogue into user-specific captions.
