PS5 Accessibility Features: The Complete Guide

The PS5 has one of the deepest sets of accessibility features of any current console, and most of it lives in a single, well-organised menu that many players never open. Whether you need to remap a button you can't comfortably reach, have the system read menus aloud, enlarge the screen, or turn on captions, the PS5 accessibility features covered here are all built in at the system level, work across most games, and cost nothing extra. This guide walks through what each feature does, where to find it, and which games go furthest, so you can set up a console that fits how you actually play.

One thing to know up front: system-level settings apply everywhere on the console, while some of the richest options live inside individual games. We'll cover both. If you're setting up a new machine from scratch, our PS5 setup guide is a good companion to read alongside this one.

Where to start: the accessibility menu

Almost everything here begins in one place: Settings > Accessibility. From the home screen, select the gear icon in the top-right, choose Accessibility, and you'll find the options grouped into sections such as display, audio, controllers, and communication. It's worth scrolling through the whole menu once, even the parts you don't think you need — features are clearly labelled, and toggling them on and off is quick.

A good habit: change one setting at a time and test it, rather than flipping several at once. That makes it obvious what each option actually does and easy to undo anything that doesn't suit you.

Controller settings and button remapping

The PS5 lets you reassign controller inputs at the system level, so the change carries across every game. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Controllers > Custom Button Assignments, turn it on, then choose Customize Button Assignments to swap any button for another. This is invaluable if a particular button is hard to reach, or if a game maps something important to an input you struggle with.

In the same area you can adjust behaviours that make the DualSense easier to use over long sessions:

• Vibration intensity and trigger effect intensity can be reduced or switched off entirely, which helps if strong haptics or stiff adaptive triggers cause discomfort.
• You can turn off the requirement to hold certain buttons and adjust related controller options to suit your setup.
• For hardware-level customisation, the DualSense Edge adds mappable back buttons and on-controller profiles, which some players find more comfortable than the standard pad.

For a fuller breakdown of the controller itself — battery, adaptive triggers and the Edge — see our DualSense guide.

Vision: screen reader, zoom and colour correction

Among the PS5 accessibility features for low vision, the built-in screen reader reads on-screen text and menu items aloud, with adjustable voice, speed and volume. Enable it under Settings > Accessibility > Screen Reader. Once on, it narrates system navigation and supported text throughout the console interface, and a text-to-speech option lets typed and selected text be spoken.

Zoom magnifies the screen so you can read small interface elements. Turn it on in Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, then use the assigned button combination to zoom in and pan around. Alongside it, the display options offer real help:

• Colour Correction adjusts the console's colours to suit different types of colour vision deficiency; find it under Settings > Accessibility > Color Correction and pick the setting that makes the interface clearest for you.
• High Contrast and related display settings increase separation between text and background so menus are easier to read.
• You can also enlarge and embolden text in supported areas to reduce eye strain.

These settings affect the system interface and carry a long way, though how much they change any given game depends on that game's own design.

Hearing: closed captions and mono audio

On the audio side, the PS5 offers system-wide options that matter for deaf and hard-of-hearing players. Closed Captions can be enabled and styled under Settings > Accessibility > Closed Captions, where you can adjust text size, colour and background so captions are comfortable to read. Whether captions appear, and how detailed they are, still depends on individual games and apps supporting them — but the system-level styling applies wherever captions are present.

Mono Audio combines the left and right channels into a single mixed signal sent to both ears, a significant help if you have hearing loss in one ear or use a single earbud. Enable it under Settings > Accessibility > Audio. In the same audio area you can adjust balance and related output settings to suit your hearing and your headset.

Communication: chat transcription and text-to-speech

Multiplayer communication has its own accessibility tools. The PS5's chat transcription feature can convert voice chat to on-screen text so you can read what other players say, and convert your typed text to speech so you can take part without speaking. You'll find these options under Settings > Accessibility > Chat Transcription, where you can enable speech-to-text and text-to-speech for party chat and set your preferences.

This pairs naturally with the console's wider text-to-speech support: players who can't or prefer not to use a microphone can still communicate in a party. For deeper detail and the current list of supported languages and regions, PlayStation's own support pages are the authoritative reference and are kept up to date.

Game-level accessibility leaders

System settings are the foundation, but some first-party PS5 games go dramatically further with their own accessibility menus. Three stand out, and are worth studying even if you're setting up options in other titles:

The pattern across all three is worth internalising: check each game's own settings menu before you start, because a well-designed game often lets you tailor difficulty, controls, motion and presentation far more precisely than the system menu can. When you're choosing what to play, our roundup of the best PS5 single-player games is a good place to find titles that tend to invest in this area.

The takeaway is simple: the PS5 accessibility features are broad, genuinely useful, and mostly a few taps away in Settings > Accessibility. Spend fifteen minutes going through remapping, the vision and hearing options, and chat transcription, then check the in-game menus of whatever you play next. Between the console's built-in tools and the standard-setting work in games like The Last of Us Part II and God of War Ragnarök, most players can build a setup that fits them — and Sony's official support site is the place to check for the latest additions.