Steam will soon start making it easier for players to search for games based on accessibility features
What’s New
Steamworks has a new accessibility-support questionnaire for developers to better describe the way their games support accessibility. If your game supports Accessibility features, you can now specify that information within Steamworks.
Gameplay options, like adjustable difficulty
Audio accessibility features, including custom volume controls and narrated game menus
Visual accessibility features, including adjustable text size and color alternatives
Input options, which include chat speech-to-text and text-to-speech
Later in the year (once we’ve given developers time to work on it from their end) we’ll start sharing the resulting information with players in the Steam store and Steam desktop client.
I wish that Steam would just unify all their damn search UIs. Like, take every criteria that they let a user search by all across their client and different parts of their website, and then make one unified UI for it and let a user search using that UI everywhere Steam permits for searches. Steam’s got the most-insanely-fragmented set of search UIs I’ve ever seen on an online service, which all have overlapping sets of functionality.
Among other things:
Sometimes permitting searching by a Boolean value — but only for one of the values. For example, searching the Store in the Web UI lets you exclude games in your library, but not include only games in your library. This is despite the fact that for tags, there’s a tri-state (Yes, No, Ignore) checkbox (at least now they do…they didn’t used to permit for exclusion there either at one point).
In the Store search, I can put an upper limit on the price I’m searching for, but not a lower limit.
It’s easy to pull up a list of games by a particular developer or publisher by clicking on their name in a game’s store page, but then one can’t use the Store search criteria to filter that down, nor can one search by developer or publisher in the Store.
Just today, I wanted to sort my games in the left-hand Library sidebar of the client by release date. The Steam client can’t do that…but you can create a shelf, another sort of search visible in the Library, sorted by Release Date.
I can sort by User Rating in the Store, but not in my Library.
I can sort by Release Date in the Store, but not search by it.
I want to have exactly the same set of search functionality in all locations that I can search. I want to be able to sort by all of those fields, search by all of those fields, and search for any value that a field might have.
That means:
In the Store search.
In the Library sidebar.
“Virtual categories” in the Library sidebar, which are basically “saved” searches that are re-invoked to build the category in the sidebar.
In Library “shelves”.
When viewing lists of games available as part of a particular sale or promotion.
When viewing lists of games from a particular developer or publisher.
It improved quite a bit since early days, it’s just the flat structure they used to run with led to a messy development and disjointed feature set.
Valve did make some changes in terms of organisation a few years ago so hopefully all the recent improvements will lead to a serious UI overhaul to tidy things up.
I’m still confused about searching by tags in the store. You can’t search by tag in the normal search bar, and the “categories” dropdown at the top doesn’t have all the tags I want.
Yeah, that’s also an issue. It should be easier to get to the “advanced Store search”. Most websites have some kind of “advanced search” or “more options” button or dropdown or something next to the search field. On Steam, none of that is accessible for the Store search until you’ve actually done a search, and then it’s exposed with the results. So basically, put your cursor in the “search” field, whack enter, and you’ll get a list of all Steam games in the Store along with all the options to do tag searches and whatnot in the right sidebar.
People need to remember that news about how Steam has like 300 employees. They do a ton with a small crew, and they stay down to earth. Coming from all sorts of console gaming and the shittyness of that, It’ll be a long time before I criticize Steam.
Did a quick search to remind myself. 300 for Valve. Only like 80 are dedicated solely to Steam.
I understand what you’re saying but we’re talking about a multi billion dollar company. At this point there is no excuse you can give for not fixing simple and easily identifiable issues with user experience - especially since all of this has been criticised for years. As much as I appreciate some of the recent additions, fixing this mess should be priority number one.
Any time I leave my library I’m reminded how aggressively meh Steams search functionality is, they have all this info and barely any of it is even utilized in things let alone in features like Collections. Also I hope since they’re looking into stuff like this they add DRM to their options for Dynamic Collections.
It drives me up the wall that steam has data on all of its games about whether it has voice or subtitles in particular languages, but refuses to let me filter by “games voiced in X language”. So instead I have to click into each and every one to see if it has the tick or the cross.
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I wish that Steam would just unify all their damn search UIs. Like, take every criteria that they let a user search by all across their client and different parts of their website, and then make one unified UI for it and let a user search using that UI everywhere Steam permits for searches. Steam’s got the most-insanely-fragmented set of search UIs I’ve ever seen on an online service, which all have overlapping sets of functionality.
Among other things:
Sometimes permitting searching by a Boolean value — but only for one of the values. For example, searching the Store in the Web UI lets you exclude games in your library, but not include only games in your library. This is despite the fact that for tags, there’s a tri-state (Yes, No, Ignore) checkbox (at least now they do…they didn’t used to permit for exclusion there either at one point).
In the Store search, I can put an upper limit on the price I’m searching for, but not a lower limit.
It’s easy to pull up a list of games by a particular developer or publisher by clicking on their name in a game’s store page, but then one can’t use the Store search criteria to filter that down, nor can one search by developer or publisher in the Store.
Just today, I wanted to sort my games in the left-hand Library sidebar of the client by release date. The Steam client can’t do that…but you can create a shelf, another sort of search visible in the Library, sorted by Release Date.
I can sort by User Rating in the Store, but not in my Library.
I can sort by Release Date in the Store, but not search by it.
I want to have exactly the same set of search functionality in all locations that I can search. I want to be able to sort by all of those fields, search by all of those fields, and search for any value that a field might have.
That means:
In the Store search.
In the Library sidebar.
“Virtual categories” in the Library sidebar, which are basically “saved” searches that are re-invoked to build the category in the sidebar.
In Library “shelves”.
When viewing lists of games available as part of a particular sale or promotion.
When viewing lists of games from a particular developer or publisher.
Any other places that I’ve missed.
Yes please! Browsing Steam is such a stupid experience, it’s staggering they still can’t be bothered to fix it.
It’s been like that since Steam was released. At least the app got a little better than 12 years ago, but even back then it was a disgrace of an app.
It improved quite a bit since early days, it’s just the flat structure they used to run with led to a messy development and disjointed feature set.
Valve did make some changes in terms of organisation a few years ago so hopefully all the recent improvements will lead to a serious UI overhaul to tidy things up.
I’m still confused about searching by tags in the store. You can’t search by tag in the normal search bar, and the “categories” dropdown at the top doesn’t have all the tags I want.
Yeah, that’s also an issue. It should be easier to get to the “advanced Store search”. Most websites have some kind of “advanced search” or “more options” button or dropdown or something next to the search field. On Steam, none of that is accessible for the Store search until you’ve actually done a search, and then it’s exposed with the results. So basically, put your cursor in the “search” field, whack enter, and you’ll get a list of all Steam games in the Store along with all the options to do tag searches and whatnot in the right sidebar.
The Steam UI in general is a mess, probably one of my least liked parts of it.
People need to remember that news about how Steam has like 300 employees. They do a ton with a small crew, and they stay down to earth. Coming from all sorts of console gaming and the shittyness of that, It’ll be a long time before I criticize Steam.
Did a quick search to remind myself. 300 for Valve. Only like 80 are dedicated solely to Steam.
I understand what you’re saying but we’re talking about a multi billion dollar company. At this point there is no excuse you can give for not fixing simple and easily identifiable issues with user experience - especially since all of this has been criticised for years. As much as I appreciate some of the recent additions, fixing this mess should be priority number one.
deleted by creator
I love how every news article I see about Steam and Valve is a W
They’re doing great
BUT we must remember that Valve runs a lucrative and immoral casino open to minors, and destroys lives this way
The Sun provides us with life, skin cancer, and heatwaves. Nothing is perfect.
Sure but people need to speak up about this issue. It’s something disgusting any no one cares
Any time I leave my library I’m reminded how aggressively meh Steams search functionality is, they have all this info and barely any of it is even utilized in things let alone in features like Collections. Also I hope since they’re looking into stuff like this they add DRM to their options for Dynamic Collections.
It drives me up the wall that steam has data on all of its games about whether it has voice or subtitles in particular languages, but refuses to let me filter by “games voiced in X language”. So instead I have to click into each and every one to see if it has the tick or the cross.