EA Expands Accessibility Patents Pledge with 23 New Patents

Electronic Arts (EA) has expanded its Accessibility Patents Pledge by adding 23 new patents to the initiative. Launched in August 2021, the pledge initially included five patents aimed at improving accessibility for players. Over the years, this number has grown to 15, and now, with the latest addition, the total stands at 38 patents.

These patents cover a range of technologies designed to make gaming more inclusive for players with disabilities or medical issues. Some of the newly added patents include:

• Intelligent Personalized Speech Recognition: A system that improves the accuracy and efficiency of speech recognition by using personal phoneme mappings for each user.
• Generating Expressive Speech Audio from Text Data: A system that generates expressive speech audio from text data, providing more control and personalization based on desired speaking style and speaker attributes.
• Generating Speech in the Voice of a Player: A system that can generate speech in the voice of a player for their avatar, based on minimal sample speech data.
• Voice Aging Using Machine Learning: A system that can age an original input voice to a desired target age without requiring additional voice samples.
• Emotion-Based Music Style Change Using Deep Learning: A system that infers a player’s emotion while playing a video game and tunes the background soundtrack to best fit that emotion.

In addition to the patents, EA has also released an Unreal Engine 5 plugin that enables in-engine use of its photosensitivity analysis tech, IRIS, which was open-sourced last year. This plugin allows developers to analyze and identify frames that could potentially impact players who experience photosensitivity and make necessary adjustments.

EA’s commitment to making games more accessible is evident in its ongoing efforts to share its accessibility-centered technology with the wider industry royalty-free. By doing so, EA aims to encourage the industry to work together to remove barriers and make gaming more inclusive for everyone.