Brawlhalla is adding real-time captioning to "significantly boost accessibility in livestream gaming"

Ubisoft's free-to-play Brawlhalla has revealed it is adding real-time captioning to "significantly boost accessibility in live stream gaming".

Teaming with Speechmatics, Ubisoft says Brawlhalla's 80 million players make the game "a prime title to demonstrate the value and importance of accessibility" and will be using Speechmatics' real-time speech-to-text API for all live streams, esports tournaments, and the game's twice-weekly developer streams.

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"The integration of these Closed Captions follows the CEA-608 standard," Ubisoft explains in a statement. "As a result, these Closed Captions are supported by a large portion of Over The Top (OTT) services, including but not limited to Twitch and Youtube.

"This also means that the Closed Captions work natively on most devices including mobile. After capturing the audio, the Speechmatics engine sends a real time text feed to a custom Wowza Engine, which inserts the text stream and sends the whole package off to its final destination in the viewer’s home."

Right now, the system only supports the English language, but there are "future ambitions to roll out the service to anyone, anywhere, and at any time".

All viewers need to do is activate the Closed Captions options at the bottom of the stream window, and the custom dictionary means the Brawlhalla team can add custom words to the stream "instantly", making it easier to showcase new characters and environments. You can see it in action if you activate the "CC" icon at the bottom of the screen right here.

"As an industry that is bigger than Hollywood and the music industry combined, there is no doubt that gaming has huge potential to lead the way on accessibility," said Katy Wigdahl, CEO at Speechmatics. "There has already been some great progress in this, with a wide range of adaptive controllers and display options available to most games and platforms, but there’s more to be done.

"We are delighted to be working with Ubisoft, with many of the Speechmatics team growing up playing its games. It’s an organisation that has an outstanding track record on accessibility – to further this goal, and we look forward to helping them continue to make gaming and streaming as inclusive as possible."