Ed has an interest in streaming, people and communities, and giving a voice to marginalised people.
I recently got to test out PlayStation Access at a hands-on event in London, Sony's new customisable accessibility controller. I was one of a handful of people attending, some with disabilities and some without. With the device before us all, we prodded and poked, we customised, we compared our setups. And we were able to play a number of games ranging in complexity.
There's an element of trial-and-error to finding the right set up for a game. For instance, swapping from Gran Turismo 7 to The Last of Us Part 1, I realised that certain regularly-used buttons were suddenly out of reach and I needed to remap many of the controls.
We were given a clean sheet of paper with the mandate of making a broadly impactful accessibility controller, whatever that means. We did a catalogue of all the existing solutions to market, we did a catalogue of all the different conditions and with the help of experts, ultimately settled on this design, which is kind of radical.
You're right to make that observation and it's something we noticed ourselves. When we were doing a catalogue of what exists on the market, there was something called Accessibility Tax. It could be a very simple button, for example, but they will charge some exorbitant price for it, in part because I think in some cases this equipment is construed as medical and so insurance gets involved. So that automatically jacks up the price of something that is ultimately very simple.
Are there any particular features you are most proud of? Or any features you weren't able to include that you wish you could have? Is there a danger with this kind of hardware that game studios start to assume they don't have to think about accessibility now because this controller exists? How do you engage with other studios?
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