The Last of Us Part 2 Accessibility Settings: Every Option

Naughty Dog published the whole list. Not a sizzle reel, not a summary — an option-by-option document with each setting name, its values and a description of what it does, published on the PlayStation.Blog on June 9, 2020, ten days before the game shipped, and still live on naughtydog.com.

This is that list, reorganised into tables you can scan, with the menu paths from Naughty Dog's own support site for the settings that are not where you would expect them.

The number is not 60

Naughty Dog's headline figure is "more than 60 accessibility settings," and that phrasing is doing quiet work. Count the entries on the list itself and you get more.

The gap between 60 and 91 is nested sliders and the difficulty menu. Lock-On Strength is a separate slider under Lock-On Aim; Scan Range and Scan Time are separate sliders under Enhanced Listen Mode; the six Audio Volumes sliders are six rows. Count those as part of their parent and you land near 60. Count them as rows and you land at 91. Neither is wrong. Add up the rows in the tables below and you can check the arithmetic yourself.

The six Game Difficulty entries are the Challenge preset plus five custom sliders, and they are a whole subject of their own. They are not repeated here — the Part II difficulty and sliders guide covers what each one does.

Where the menu is, and how to read it

The path is Options > Accessibility, per Naughty Dog's support article on customising these settings. That article also carries a detail the menu does not announce: any accessibility feature you have changed from its default is marked with a dot next to the feature name. If you are handing a controller back to someone else, or trying to work out which of forty toggles you flipped three weeks ago, the dots are the audit trail.

The three presets sit at the top of that menu. Everything else is grouped into the sections below, in the order Naughty Dog lists them.

What the three presets actually switch on

The preset is the fastest way into this menu, and Naughty Dog's list names the settings each one enables:

Two caveats, both from the source. First, Naughty Dog introduces each of those lists with "such as" — they are representative, not exhaustive, and the Vision and Motor presets both end with an unenumerated "various adjustments in the Combat Accessibility menu." So a preset can switch on things the published list does not name. Second, a preset is a starting point, not a lock: Naughty Dog's own framing is that you can "go through and tweak individual options, even after selecting a preset."

Naughty Dog's support site corroborates one of these independently — its Lock-On Targeting article states that Lock-On Targeting is included in both the Vision and the Motor preset.

Alternate Controls, and Holds and Presses

Naughty Dog describes this as "the first time in a Naughty Dog game" they offered full control customisation, remapping "every command to a different controller input, including touch pad swipes and controller shake."

Naughty Dog flags two of these as vision-specific recommendations rather than preferences: Boat Controls Default and Rope/Ladder Movement Camera are both recommended for players using Navigation Assistance to orient themselves.

The Holds and Presses menu exists because, in Naughty Dog's words, "holding or rapidly tapping buttons can be challenging for some players." Seven of the nine entries convert a hold into a toggle or a mash into a hold; Bow Firing swaps the hold for taps instead, and Hold Breath Mode runs the other way.

Sprinting is worth knowing about specifically: the list marks it "available with Patch 1.01," with the footnote that an internet connection is required — so it came down with the patch rather than on the disc. Hold Breath Mode is the odd one out in the other direction — it is the only entry here that defaults to Toggle.

Assistance: aim, camera and pickups

Three details from the source that change how you would set these. Lock-On Aim targets the centre of the body by default and you can push the right stick to move the lock to the head or legs — it is not a fixed headshot cheat. Arc-Throw Lock-on deliberately aims slightly away from enemies while you are in stealth, because the point of a thrown brick is the distraction, and you push the right stick if you want to hit the person instead. And Camera Assist is aimed at "players who are new to action games or have difficulty using Left Stick and Right Stick simultaneously," which is a wider brief than the menu name suggests.

Menu path for the aim settings, per Naughty Dog's support site: Options > Accessibility > Alternate Controls > Lock-On Aim, with Arc-Throw Lock-On in the same submenu.

Magnification, visual aids and motion sickness

High Contrast Display and Screen Magnifier are both driven from the touch pad rather than the menu once enabled: a swipe left toggles high contrast, and a light double-tap toggles the magnifier, with a held second tap ramping the zoom and locking it on release.

Field of View is not in the display settings. It is in the Motion Sickness section of the Accessibility menu, which is worth knowing before you go looking for it under graphics.

Navigation, traversal and audio cues

This is the block Naughty Dog built so that blind and low-vision players could finish the game, and it is the most mechanically interesting part of the menu.

The button layer matters here, and Naughty Dog's support article spells it out: with both Navigation Assistance and Enhanced Listen Mode enabled, hold R1 for listen mode, then Square scans for enemies and Circle scans for pickups, and L3 in listen mode points you at the most recently scanned target instead of at the story path. The scan returns audio cues at the target's location, and the pitch of the cue changes with the target's height relative to you — that is how vertical position gets communicated without a screen.

Skip Puzzle is at Options > Accessibility > Navigation and Traversal > Skip Puzzle Option, and Naughty Dog calls it "highly recommended for players who are blind or have low vision because some puzzle progression may not be fully accessible" — a rare case of a developer saying plainly that part of its own game did not get there.

Text-to-Speech auto-enables in-game for players whose console language is English and who have text-to-speech switched on at the system level, so it can be on before you ever open the menu. Naughty Dog's footnote is that text-to-speech is available in all supported languages except Thai.

Audio Volumes is its own six-slider menu, and the reason it belongs in an accessibility list is the last two rows: the cues and the narration each get a channel of their own, independent of effects, dialogue and music.

The guitar is not an afterthought in this menu. It has its own input option in Alternate Controls and its own vibration cue toggle, and the Hearing preset switches that cue on by name. If you want the mode rather than the settings, that is the Guitar Free Play guide.

HUD indicators and subtitles

Awareness Indicators Always is marked "available with Patch 1.01" on the list and is the setting Naughty Dog specifically recommends for deaf and hard-of-hearing players, because it converts an audio tell — an enemy calling out that they have seen you — into a persistent visual one.

Story + Combat Dialogue is the one to know about. Part II's enemies call each other by name while they hunt you, and Naughty Dog notes this was the first Naughty Dog game to subtitle all that systemic combat chatter. With subtitles set to Story only, a deaf player loses that entire layer — and it is a layer the game is built around. The Part II enemies guide covers what those callouts actually tell you.

Combat Accessibility is a gated menu

Everything in this section sits behind one master switch — Enable Combat Accessibility — and Naughty Dog's own warning on it is that these settings "can significantly alter the gameplay experience."

Two entries have fine print worth reading twice. Invisible While Prone set to Limited ties the invisibility timer to your stealth difficulty setting rather than to a fixed number, so it behaves differently on a custom slider build than it does on a preset. And Reduced Enemy Perception and Reduced Enemy Accuracy are both explicitly "relative to the chosen difficulty" — they scale the curve, they do not replace it.

For how this menu interacts with the hardest challenge level and with the gameplay modifiers, see the Part II difficulty guide.

Audio descriptions are not in the Accessibility menu

Naughty Dog's support site answers this one directly for Part II Remastered, and the two features people conflate sit behind two different paths:

Cinematic Descriptions lives under Making Of > Commentary, next to the developer commentary track, rather than in the Accessibility menu. The game has audio description; it is simply filed with the other alternate audio tracks.

Note the naming as well: the 2020 Part II feature list calls the text-narration option Text-to-Speech, while the Remastered support article and the Part I feature list both call it Screen Reader. Same function, two names, and Naughty Dog still uses "Text-to-Speech" in its patch notes — Part II Remastered's PS5 patch 2.1.0 lists "various minor Text-to-Speech fixes across multiple languages." If a guide and your menu disagree on the label, that is why.

What Part I and Remastered changed

The 2022 remake inherited the Part II menu and added to it, and Part II Remastered then pulled those additions back into the sequel. PlayStation's published Part I list runs under the same ten section headings as the Part II one, so treat the tables above as the shape of Part I's menu rather than a row-for-row match — individual entries move where the mechanics differ between the two games.

Naughty Dog's own framing of the remaster is that it added "Speech to Vibrations and Cinematic Descriptions, which we previously included in The Last of Us Part I," so the direction of travel is Part I first, sequel second.

Both additions are worth understanding rather than just ticking. Cinematic Descriptions was not written in-house: Naughty Dog partnered with Descriptive Video Works, a service whose background is television, film and game trailers, and shipped the description track across the game's localised languages. Speech to Vibrations plays spoken dialogue through the DualSense as vibration, so a deaf player can feel the delivery of a line — the emphasis and rhythm the subtitle cannot carry — alongside the text.

Naughty Dog also states that No Return, the roguelike mode, "integrates a number of Part II Remastered's accessibility features," so the settings are not campaign-only. What No Return actually is lives in the No Return guide.

PC changes the control half

Part II Remastered reached PC on April 3, 2025, and the control accessibility grew there rather than shrinking. Naughty Dog's PC feature rundown lists "full control remapping, primary and secondary bindings for keyboard and mouse control, an adaptive mode that allows players to combine keyboard and controller inputs, and more." Secondary bindings and a keyboard-plus-controller adaptive mode are meaningful for anyone running a one-handed layout or a mixed input rig, and Naughty Dog lists both as PC-release features.

The DualSense is supported on PC with full haptic feedback, with the caveat Naughty Dog states plainly: a wired connection is required for the full range of DualSense features. That matters for Speech to Vibrations and the vibration cue options, which are haptic features first.

Which platform runs which release is its own tangle — the versions guide has the full table.

Quick Action Checklist

• Open Options > Accessibility. Anything you have already changed carries a dot next to its name.
• Start from a preset if one matches your needs, then tweak. Presets are a starting configuration, not a lock, and the published preset lists are examples rather than the complete set of switches.
• Blind and low-vision: Text-to-Speech / Screen Reader, High Contrast Display, Navigation Assistance and Enhanced Listen Mode together (hold R1, Square for enemies, Circle for pickups, L3 to head for the last scan), Ledge Guard, Skip Puzzle Option.
• Deaf and hard of hearing: Subtitles set to Story + Combat Dialogue, Subtitle Names and Direction on, Awareness Indicators set to Always, Combat Vibration Cues.
• Fine-motor and one-handed: Control Scheme Right Hand Only or Left Hand Only, Repeated Button Presses and Melee Combos set to Hold, Aiming Mode and Listen Mode set to Toggle, Auto Pick-Up, Lock-On Aim with the strength slider tuned.
• Motion sickness: Camera Shake and Motion Blur down, Dolly Zoom Effect off, Persistent Center Dot on. Field of View is in this section, not in the display settings.
• Looking for audio description? It is Making Of > Commentary > Toggle Cinematic Descriptions, not the Accessibility menu — and it exists in Part I and Part II Remastered, not in the 2020 PS4 release.
• On PC, check the secondary bindings and adaptive mode in the control settings, and wire up a DualSense if you want the haptic cue options at full strength.