Latest Street Fighter 5 Patch Makes It Unplayable For Blind Players

Street Fighter 5’s latest patch has rendered the game unplayable for blind players due to its sound being switched from stereo to mono.

You might think video games are off the table for blind people. That couldn’t be further from the truth. There are thousands of blind gamers out there who rely on sound and accessibility to play various titles. That’s why Street Fighter 5’s newest patch has upset a lot of players. The changes to the game’s sound means it is now unplayable if you’re blind.

The sound has been switched from stereo to mono. Stereo sound allowed blind players to detect where exactly a sound had come from and react accordingly. Now that Street Fighter 5’s sound has been switched to mono, making it all come from the same place, that is no longer possible.

BlindWarriorSven was one of the first people to flag the issue, pleading with Capcom on Twitter to reverse the change ASAP. “I just installed the new patch on my pc, went to training mode and discovered that all character sound effects like attacks, hits, jumps, block, voices etc. are mono (centered),” they tweeted. Other players have been making the discovery too, questioning why the sound would need to be changed in this way.

The simple answer is that it doesn’t. Perhaps they’ve been distracted by Ryu and Chun-Li’s introduction to Fortnite. There’s no logical reason why Capcom would want Street Fighter 5’s sound to be mono instead of stereo. Hopefully, that means this was unintentional and an emergency follow-up patch will be introduced to fix it. Until then, blind Street Fighter 5 players will be stuck. Fingers crossed it is something that can be fixed fast.

Accessibility in games is something all developers should be challenged on if there’s a belief that more can be done to make a title more accessible. Something as simple as making a game’s sound stereo rather than mono has to be challenged. For Xbox and PC developers unsure whether they have done enough, Microsoft is now inviting them to send their games to them so that they can be accessibility tested before release.