An update released yesterday for Gotham Knights brings new content, fixes, and accessibility features. A new 15 floor raid called The Kelvin Incident is available in new game plus or after unlocking the raid area and defeating all the side villain missions. A Twitter thread and the patch notes for Gotham Knights show us accessibility has been improved, adding remapping and expanding available text-to-speech using the system’s screen reader.
Remapping, essential for accessibility
As our review of Gotham Knights mentioned, remapping was not available at all. I don’t have to tell you how remapping is one of the most essential accessibility features. This update adds remapping for all versions. On the console version it is available for controllers. For the PC version controller and keyboard and mouse remapping is available. Additionally on both versions it’s possible to change more hold actions to toggles. Both of these are great news for players struggling with the standard controls.
Screen reader support
Something our review didn’t cover is the screen reader support in Gotham Knights. As I understand it, it had some menu narration available on launch. It does this through the system’s built-in screen reader. Using the screen reader provided by the platform is helpful as this will follow the settings the player uses system wide. It also prevents the need for external online services that some games use for text-to-speech, adding multiple points of failure.
With this update the game expands its text-to-speech beyond menu narration. According to the patch notes, Gotham Knights now supports the platform’s screen reader for all text and certain menus. Narration is improved where it existed previously. Text-speech is only available in English.
We love seeing important accessibility improvements added after launch, almost as much as before launch. It shows commitment to players and their needs, especially when certain features may be relatively difficult to implement post-launch. While there is also a handy accessibility reference page for Gotham Knights, at this time it has not yet been updated.
