In collaboration with its community, Cloud Imperium Games has added American Sign Language support to Star Citizen for its deaf and hard of hearing players.

This is a great step forward for making games more inclusive, and other developers should take note when considering adding accessible features to their titles as well.

It also seems to be one of the first games to include ASL emotes in this way, so it's important to commend the effort.

"We have a lot of community members who are hard of hearing or maybe deaf and they don't interact with the game in the same way that someone who hears voice would do so," explains animation director Steve Bender in a developer video. 

In response, Star Citizen devs added emotes for deaf and partially deaf players in American Sign Language. "I'm really happy for the community to have this opportunity to be able to roleplay and to express themselves in the way that they see fit," Bender adds.