"Tekken 8" director Katsushiro Harada revealed in early January that changes would be made to the game's accessibility features after concerns about potentially life-threatening seizures related to color and mask filters circulated.

In late December, a then-deleted viral tweet began circulating showing a demonstration of one of the accessibility filter combinations in "Tekken 8," a combination of black and white striped characters and a nearly blank background. While the original tweet was positive, further citation retweets and discussion indicated that the particular combination shown may do more harm than good for some people with photo sensitivity.

Accessibility expert Ian Hamilton told Harada that "one of the filters [the striped one] needs to be removed urgently," and EA's accessibility lead, Morgan Baker, said that seeing the filter "induced an aura migraine.

It is worth noting that the filter in question required several steps and adjustments before it reached the level of intensity presented through viral tweets and discussions, but the danger was still very real. Harada initially stated that when the issue first came up, "a very small number of people misunderstood the accessibility options we were trying, or only watched the video without actually trying them out in the demo play."

He went on to say that the color vision option is "a rarity in the fighting game genre, but we are still working on it and will expand it in the future," adding that the team is "working with several research institutions and communities" to develop this option.

Now, the "future" seems pretty close. During the Tekken Talk Live event at the Tekken World Tour 2023 Finals earlier this month, Harada said through producer and interpreter Michael Murray, "A lot of people have talked about the accessibility feature in the Tekken 8 demo. Actually, that was still a work in progress. So we've tweaked it quite a bit to address some of the issues and make it work better for more people."

This is a change that will apply not only to the production version, but also to the demo version in the near future. Whether the accessibility changes will be ready when the game launches on January 26, or whether they will have to wait a little longer, has not really been specified.

Regardless, this is a step in the right direction. Developers are still in the process of navigating accessibility in games, and while the situation is much better than it has been in the past few years, there is still a long way to go. At the very least, avoiding choices that might cause seizures or migraines is a good start.