(Xbox One) The Division 2 Private Beta Accessibility Discovery
Whilst testing out The Division 2's private beta, I found a menu option (via OCR) called "enable menu narration (English only)". Turning this on allowed me to complete the rest of the setup process without sighted assistance, including selecting my preferred audio mix, setting a number for the brightness, choosing whether I wanted subtitles on/off etc.
That was impressive enough, but once I'd managed to get into the game itself, through a couple of screens that didn't have this feature active (which is kind of expected as this is a beta), I pressed the menu button whilst in the tutorial area (which doesn't have readable tutorial prompts). I was very surprised and pleased to find that the menus started immediately reading insofar as they'd been implemented to do so. The most interesting aspect for me was the settings menu, which allowed me, should I need to, to set the camera sensitivity, adjust dead zones for each stick, change controller layouts, adjust communication preferences and volumes, etc. Not everything in these menus read, as previously stated, but the vast majority of them did (with a few small hiccups). I'm interested to see the progression of this feature from beta to final game, given that it appeared the character creator might also be accessible (had the options not been locked behind a randomisation system specifically for the beta).
To the question of regions and platforms, as the title states I've only tested this on the Xbox One platform, specifically on an Xbox One X. I'm not sure how PS4 would handle this system, if any kind of equivalent is included at all. Judging by the way the system worked in testing though, I'd speculate that this is a bespoke solution (rather than one that works with the Microsoft XDK's accessibility features) as the game didn't take into account my non-US Narrator voice and voice speed in terms of user preferences. Consequently, there is a possibility that this would be available on PS4 copies of the beta as well.
Though The Division 2 isn't likely to be very playable as a gamer without sight given the nature of the game itself, I am very impressed to be seeing a game that shows such progress in the field of accessible menus this early into the CVAA deadline having passed at the beginning of this year. This makes me even more optimistic for the future of the games industry in general, as well as the possibilities of Microsoft's first-party "Xbox Game Studio" titles which could take theoretically greater advantage of accessibility features available on the Xbox platform.
Here's a deep dive into the settings showing the feature in action
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