Kait repelling into a cenote filled with luscious greenery and an icy colored pool of water beneath her

Accessibility in Gears 5

The Coalition is excited to bring a wealth of features to Gears 5 to provide a usable experience for as many players as possible. The following features can be found in the options menu.

Color Blind Mode

Colorblind mode allows players affected by protanopia, deuteranopia,
and tritanopia to better navigate the UI and play the game by changing certain
colors so that their differences can still be recognized.

Accessibility Options: Menu displaying the list of Accessibility options

Camera Shake

Players that have difficulty playing during quick camera movement can turn off all sources of camera shake.

Campaign Camera Shake

Toggles all sources of camera shake while playing the campaign. Only available in Beginner difficulty level.

PvE Camera Shake

Toggles all sources of camera shake in Horde and Escape. Available when playing from Beginner up to Advanced difficulty levels.

Target Lock

Target lock will help players who are new to shooters or need a little help with targeting enemies. Turning target lock on will auto-aim your reticle while aiming down sights. This is enabled when playing from Beginner up to Advanced difficulty in Horde, Escape, and Campaign.

Fabricator Ping on Tac-com (Horde)

Enabling Fabricator Ping will cause the fabricator in Horde to emit a ping sound while in tac-com. The ping will increase in volume as you approach, making it a valuable navigational tool.

Navigation Ping (Escape Mode)

Navigation Ping is a feature that helps low or no vision players navigate the complex environments in Escape Mode. Audio cues in the game world highlight the path towards the exit. Unique audio cues are used if the player needs to press a button or climb over cover.

There are two settings that support different levels of assistance (Next Doorways and Full Path). Next Doorways highlights the exit of the current room, and Full Path uses more frequent pings to help players navigate around walls and pieces of cover. Each option is available as “Always On” and “On Tac-com.”

Improved Subtitles

Subtitles have been improved in Gears 5. We’ve added a backplate that improves contrast, all speakers are identified by name, and we now distinguish voices that are on the radio from those that aren’t.

Subtitle Size

Players can choose to increase or decrease the subtitle size to ensure they’re always easy to read.

Button Tap Challenges

Some areas of the game require quickly tapping a button. Changing this setting allows players to hold the button down instead of having to quickly tap.

Controller Vibration

This setting gives players the option to turn off controller vibrations.

Text to Speech

Players who would like to have their text chat read aloud can turn Text to Speech on. Any text that is sent through the game chat will be read aloud, so long as it meets the Xbox Community Standards guidelines.

Speech to Text

Turning Speech to Text on will ensure that any voice chat received is displayed as text in the text chat window.

Swap Sticks While Aimed

To enable easier aiming for players with limited mobility, we’ve added an option called SWAP STICKS WHILE AIMED. Turning this feature on will swap the left and right stick controls while aiming down sights. This setting works best when combined with the SINGLE STICK MOVEMENT setting to support players who need to play using one stick.

Single Stick Movement

This setting allows players to play Gears 5 effectively with one stick. Turning it on changes the left stick so that it controls both movement and rotation. This setting works best when combined with the SWAP STICKS WHILE AIMED setting.

Face Trigger Control Scheme

Our face trigger control scheme is great for players with limited mobility. It brings aiming and shooting to the face buttons on the controller so that most gameplay can be achieved without having to use the triggers.

Aim Toggle

Turning Aim Toggle on will change the controls so that holding the aim button-down is no longer necessary. Press once to toggle into aim, press again to toggle out.

Invert Y/X-axis

For players that prefer to press up to look down, right to look left, and vice versa, we’ve included the ability to invert both vertical and horizontal axes.

Left-handed Sticks & Triggers

Some players may prefer to play with the stick and trigger controls swapped. The LEFT-HANDED STICKS setting swaps the right and left stick controls, while the LEFT-HANDED TRIGGERS setting swaps the right and left triggers and bumpers.

Automatic Reload

Turning this setting on will cause guns to automatically reload when empty. You can find this setting in the GAME section of the options menu.

Text Chat Duration

If you need to increase or decrease the length of time that text chat remains on screen after receiving a message, head to the TEXT CHAT DURATION setting in the GAME section of the options menu.

Expanded Audio Options

We’ve added expanded audio options in Gears 5 to give you greater control over the audio in your game. In the AUDIO section of the options menu, you’ll find sliders that control the master volume, music volume, effects volume, character dialogue volume, cinematics volume, and environmental volume.

Gore

Turning off gore removes blood splatters and custom executions from the game.

Mature Content

Turn off mature content to disable swearing in the campaign story. However, this setting doesn’t prevent a player from hearing profanity through voice chat during online play.

Text Chat Profanity Filter

Turning the profanity filter off will ensure that any text chat received has gone through filtering that prevents most profanity from appearing on screen. Caveat: Some players may discover clever tricks to get around the filter, but we do our best to capture as much as we can.

Narrator

The Coalition is excited to bring Narrator to its Gears 5 menus and UI. While it doesn’t cover every screen and piece of UI, it should help players navigate to the most vital screens and social experiences. We are actively working on improving its accessibility offerings and will strive to ensure the experience is improved in further updates or titles.

Supported Platforms

The narrator is supported on the following platforms:

Xbox One (all versions)
WinStore (Windows 10)
Steam (Windows 10)

How to Enable Narrator on Xbox

The narrator can be found in the Xbox Settings menu. Simply navigate to Ease of Access > Game Transcription > Let Games Read To Me.

How to Enable Narrator on Windows 10 / Steam

To enable narrator on Windows 10 / Steam, download and open the Xbox Console Companion app from the Microsoft Store. Once open, navigate to the Settings area and enable “Let games read to me”.

Narrator Levels

We have three levels of narration coverage in Gears 5:

Full Narration: the screen has full narration implementation.
Partial Narration: the screen has narration but is missing parts.
No Narration: the screen does not have any narration.

Known Bugs

Cannot use virtual keyboard and Controller for text chat. Must connect a keyboard or chat-pad in order to use text chat.
Narration does not work on pause screens the first time you enter them. Players must dismiss the pause screen, then open it again to work, and then it’ll work every time after that session.
Narration is not working during load screens. Load screens will appear when entering any gameplay experience from a lobby. The expected load time per device type is as follows:
- Xbox One X: 30-45 seconds
- Xbox One S: 45-50 seconds
- Windows 10 recommended spec or higher: 30-45 seconds
- Windows 10 minimum spec up to recommended spec: up to 2 minutes
  *If playing with other players that are on less powerful devices, load times may take longer.
In the controller remapping, the right column is for primary input, and the left column is for secondary input.
Narration on the Virtual Wallet reads out the values in order for Boost, Scrap, and Iron but doesn’t qualify with the description for each.
- It’ll say “Boost, two days, zero, fifty.” instead of “Boost, two days. Scrap, zero. Iron, fifty.”

Conventions

In Gears 5, most of the menus can be navigated with the following Xbox controller conventions:

[A] button, Select
[B] button, Go Back, Cancel
[Left Trigger], My Tour
[Right Trigger]. Social Panel

Note: these conventions will not apply if buttons have been remapped.