Microsoft releases accessible gaming controller for players with limited mobility

Video games should be for everybody and Microsoft has made another leap to make that reality Thursday when it announced the Adaptive Controller for Xbox.

According to Microsoft, the new controller, which will be available at a later date this year, can be connected to external buttons, switches, joysticks and mounts, giving players with a wide range of physical disabilities the ability to customize their setups.

Microsoft said the new controller is the most flexible adaptive controller made by a major gaming company and the device can be used to play Xbox One and Windows 10 PC games. It also supports Xbox Wireless Controller features such as button remapping.

“I can customize how I interface with the Xbox Adaptive Controller with whatever I want,” said Solomon Romney, a Microsoft retail learning specialist born without fingers on his left hand. “If I want to play a game entirely with my feet, I can. I can make the controls fit my body, my desires, and I can change them anytime I want. You plug in whatever you want and go. It takes virtually no time to set it up and use it. It could not be simpler.”

According to Microsoft, the beginning of the idea for a controller for disabled gamers came when a Microsoft employee was scrolling through social media and saw a post from a charity that provides gaming devices to wounded veterans. The process began at Microsoft’s annual Hackathon in 2015 and was further refined by engineers over the next three years.

The development of the controller wasn’t always guaranteed. Several employees had to make the push internally to convince top brass that a controller that needed a lot of development resources for a relatively small population was worth it. One of those employees was Leo Del Castillo, general manager of hardware during the development of the controller.

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“Trying to develop a business case for an accessible product can be very, very challenging, because the scale of the products don’t generally make a positive business case for the investment that has to go in,” Del Castillo said. “You have to look at your return on investment in a way that is not just financial.”

Steve Spohn has always been an outspoken advocate for gaming accessibility and has been one of the faces of Ablegamers, a non-profit charity whose goal is to make gaming more accessible for everyone. Spohn now serves as chief operating officer for Ablegamers.

Spohn began gaming when he was five years old, when his mom bought him an Atari gaming console. Spohn was born with spinal muscular atrophy and as it progressed, he began having trouble operating a controller. He then made the switch to PC gaming, but that became problematic too. At one point, struggling to use a keyboard, he used a dental tool as an extender, resting his hand by the space bar and using the tool to reach the upper keys.

“I had been doing stuff like that for years,” Spohn said. “My mom taught me that you take an everyday object and repurpose it for something you need it for, and that’s how you continue surviving in the world. So I would get a faster mouse or a keyboard with the buttons spread out differently. But eventually, the off-the-shelf solutions stopped working.”

The controller features 19 ports with 3.5 mm jacks. Those players who already have devices designed for specific purposes can plug them in and use them as peripheries to this controller. The two large circles on the front of the controller are buttons designed to be easily pressed. They are automatically mapped to the A and B buttons but, like everything else on the controller, they are reprogrammable.

“We’ve never built a gaming product like this before and we knew we needed feedback to get it right,” said James Shields, product marketing manager at Xbox. “We worked with several groups and they helped us design the features, the industrial design and even the packaging. From a high-level point of view, this product is central to the company goal. We want to enable everyone to play games.”

The controller will be released later this year and will retail for $129.99. According to Shields, comparative to other controllers that serve the same purpose, this is a very accessible price as other controllers are closer to the $1,000 mark.