Platform fighter Brawlhalla teams with Speechmatics to lead the way in gaming accessibility

A study from disability charity Scope showed that 66% of gamers with impairments face barriers or issues relating to video games, so it comes as a very positive step as Ubisoft announces collaboration with Speechmatics to provide improved accessibility for its platform fighter Brawlhalla.

There are over 80 million players across all consoles and mobile devices that play Brawlhalla, making it a perfect candidate to demonstrate the value and importance of accessibility. By teaming up with Speechmatics, a new feature will become available to make watching streamers, including esports tournaments, more accessible to all players.

Using the real-time speech-to-text API, viewers will be able to simply toggle the Closed Captain option and be able to follow along with all the actions and conversations that are being had on the stream. Speechmatics will capture the stream's audio, and send it in real-time to a custom Wowza Engine, which will produce the captains and send it straight to the viewers. Anyone who has used subtitles on live TV will know there will of course be a delay, but it is still a massive step forward for now.

Any gamer will know that gamers have their own vocabulary and shorthand for things that happen during matches that maybe a normal dictionary won’t have, but thanks to Speechamtics’ Custom Dictionary feature, the Brawhalla team can manually add words instantly for the program to start using. This will obviously be more prominent during esport matches and the twice-weekly developer streams.

Whilst this will definitely be a worldwide boon with more work, the real-time captions will first only be available in English. There are future ambitions to increase the number of languages for more inclusivity, but it had to begin somewhere.

Make sure to download Brawlhalla now from the App Store and Google Play now to enjoy some platform-based pugilism.