When EA Sports released FC 26 in September, the football game came loaded with a feature that should have been controversial. For the first time in a major competitive sports title, developers enabled high contrast mode in head-to-head multiplayer matches. In theory, accessibility features that make visuals clearer for some players could hand others an unfair edge. In practice, the disabled community noticed something different: EA had finally built a game around them.
Within several months of its release, FC 26 secured nominations for awards at The Game Awards' Innovation in Accessibility Award and IGN's The Best Accessible Games of 2025, and it won at the Game Accessibility Conference's AAA Excellence and Greatest Accessibility Innovation awards. The accolades reflect a fundamental shift in how mainstream game studios think about accessibility.
The high contrast mode itself is straightforward in concept but deceptively sophisticated in execution. Players can choose different colours at varying saturation levels that highlight objects on the screen, from the home team and its corresponding goal to the away team and its goal, to even the colour of the ball itself, allowing blind and low vision players to confidently access important visual information on the screen. The feature can be especially helpful for low-vision and blind players or those who find it challenging to track fast-paced gameplay. The mode also addresses cognitive needs; players who struggle to distinguish team colours can now customise them independently.
What makes FC 26 remarkable is less the feature itself than the conviction behind its implementation. Multiple teams needed to work in parallel to ensure high contrast mode could function at launch, from rendering to the stadium team to the front-end team focusing on the interface setting, with every developer working together. The risk was real. The team decided to try for an industry first: a competitive accessibility setting, one that set out to defy the myth that accessibility gives people a distinct advantage. When it came to the implementation into player-versus-player multiplayer, they decided early on to prioritise fact over speculation.
The decision to include disabled players directly in development proved crucial. Morgan Baker, accessibility development director at EA, explained that when there is so much to do, it is easy to become overwhelmed, but by tapping into the FC Accessibility Design Council made up of disabled gamers and consultants with years of football experience, the team was able to lock in with a clear focus and vision. This wasn't a checkbox exercise; the council shaped priorities from the outset.
Paul Parsons, gameplay producer for EA Sports FC, acknowledged the reality of development constraints. As he noted, one of the cruel realities of game development is that you never get to ship the game you wanted to make. For FC 26, this meant accepting that not every accessibility feature could ship at launch. Instead of spreading efforts thin, the team focused relentlessly on high contrast mode, refining it beyond the original conservative vision.
The broader accessibility suite extends well beyond high contrast. Text-to-speech and speech-to-text are available and can be turned on during first boot or from the accessibility settings menu, allowing players to send text messages synthesised into speech to participate in voice communication and receive voice messages transcribed as text. Shadows on the pitch can make it difficult to see characters and follow the ball, so FC 26 includes toggles for both player and stadium shadows. For players with limited mobility, simplified skill moves allow those with difficulty executing tackling skill moves to perform them with a flick of the right stick on the controller, with the skill move performed depending on context for the appropriate result.
Accessibility is frequently built upon the successes and failures of other games, both internally and across other external studios, and Paul Parsons and Morgan Baker explained that this back-and-forth is part of how studios create a comprehensive review of features and push accessibility forward. The industry's reluctance to innovate in competitive spaces stems partly from fear of the unknown. Yet Parsons suggested this caution misses the real frontier. Future accessibility breakthroughs likely won't come from single-player modes, where designers already know how to make games work for disabled players. The challenge lies in multiplayer environments where consistency and fairness matter.
For Australian players, accessibility improvements mean the game works better regardless of location. FC 26 is available across all major platforms with full accessibility settings support, and the accessibility features were designed using close work with the Accessibility Design Council, with EA taking meaningful steps to set a new standard for accessibility in sports gaming.
The conversation around accessibility in competitive gaming often circles back to fairness and balance. But there is a deeper principle at stake. If accessibility features give disabled players genuine tools to compete, that isn't an unfair advantage; that's fairness itself. The team set out to defy the myth that accessibility gives people a distinct advantage. By treating that myth as speculation rather than fact, EA Sports FC 26 became not just a more inclusive game but a more honest one.