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Allow all controls to be remapped to better suit accessible controllers.

Author:
Michelle Hinn
Date added:
Sunday, 07 June 2009
Last revised:
Thursday, 10 June 2010
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Answer

ScenarioFrank, who is quadriplegic, uses a special game controller called a Quad Controller (http://www.quadcontrol.com/joystick.htm). It allows Frank to play his favorite game titles entirely with his mouth via a series of tubes that he breathes in and out of, depending on the buttons he's trying to press. There are also levers to move up or down and buttons to press, and movement is controlled via a mouthpiece. He can get through a fair number of games with it, but is hugely frustrated that hardly any of the videogames he bought let you remap any of the controls. There are times when he'll start up a game only to find out very quickly that he's not going to be able to get anywhere in it because he has to press a two-button sequence constantly -- requiring him to puff air in one tube and sip air out of another tube at the exact same time -- which is entirely impossible...

How to Solve It:

Remappable controls are still common in PC gaming, but are extremely rare in the world of console gaming. It is not unheard of for a console game to allow full remapping of controls, but it is far more common for games to offer a finite set of predefined control schemes, presumably because this is easier for the Quality Assurance process.

Fully remappable controls allow users to define the game inputs irrespective of the hardware they are using to control the game. Predefined control schemes may not suit specialist interface hardware, of the sort required by users with significant mobility problems, and are thus a barrier to accessibility.

It may be that developers are avoiding remappable controls on consoles because of the problems they produce in QA. This is understandable, but this problem isn't going to disappear if developers don't start tackling it. If necessary, we can petition the console manufacturers to provide support for this kind of feature in the tools they supply for development, but this would be easier to achieve if developers joined in the crusade to establish remappable controls as an industry standard.

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