Hello Valorant's community !

I'll start off by stating that I love this game, I've been playing it since beta and, in spite of my performance, I keep going back to it. However, there is a problem that is becoming increasingly painful as the player base grows and the expectations that the teammates have on us increase. I'm a deaf player, and I am part of a deaf gamer discord, where we gather and discuss games, or even play them together.

About Valorant, one topic comes back very often with my friends, and it's that the game has a real problem towards deaf people. I'll explain why :

Recently, games devs have increased their accessibility features geared towards disabled people, either physically or sensorially disabled people, with the inclusion of subtitles, high contrast mode, color blind modes, special controllers, audio description... Features that are still missed in Valorant. A subtitle feature would help us detect ultimates. The ping system is a step towards a better system, but it's still lackluster, I'd love to have more features and comms in the wheel, why just limit to 4?

Secondly, the player base is extremely toxic towards deaf people. I've had more and more games where teammates would just give up the game or ask for a forfeit when I tell them I'm deaf (which usually comes after me not noticing the player is behind me, or a reload sound not being noticed). It's beginning to impact my desire to play the game, and I keep being belittled, being said I shouldn't even play ranked because I keep holding my teammates down, that I sould be able to hear voice (which I can't, as I lipread). This is a form of discrimination, and I'm amazed those people don't realize we're the same rank, more or less, which means I'm as worthy as them to be in it.

So please, next time you see someone maybe not noticing the sounds around them, maybe not being aware of where the enemies are, he might just be deaf, not dumb.