Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

news.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 78 posts

Re: A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

#61

Post by dragontamer »

Storytime.

I had an online acquaintance who I practiced with in a fighting game called Blazblue. Said friend was also a martial-artist who also did live-steel fights. Dangerous, yes, but apparently there were rules about what weapons you could bring in, "first blood" and other such rules to try and keep things non-deadly.

Anyway, one of his opponents used poison as his weapon, and now his hands were permanently F'd up due to that one poison fight.

Long story short: I didn't see him online much after that. Its difficult for disabled people to get controllers that work well for them.

And its not just arbitrary fights where people can lose the fine motor control of their hands. I know people who lost fine control after a bad car accident. (Fortunately, this one was temporary and after about a year, she got most of her motor control back into her hands).

So any research into allowing injured people to better play video games (a hobby I'm very much like), is a win in my eyes. I've got at least two people who've I've personally met who would benefit. Even with today's advanced medicine, its not guaranteed that motor control will return back to your hands if you are injured.

And injuries can really happen to anybody.

Re: A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

#62

Post by phaedrus »

When I was in junior high or highschool I made an SNES controller for my friend's mom who had limited hand movement due to a stroke. I made her a joystick from a piece of PVC pipe, two plastic spools, and a plastic case about the size of a cigar box for the base. The way the mechanism worked was I used strips of packing foam to center the PVC pipe inside the hole in the spools, and mounted 4 microswitches in a collar facing the PVC pipe. Instead of a big movement like a traditional joystick, it required only 1/8 inch "twitch" movements to close the microswitches, but was surprisingly precise & responsive considering it was made out of scraps and hot glue. (But then again I designed it to work with the limits of the materials I had access to, and "tuned" the placement of the switches as I built up the device.)

Re: A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

#63

Post by InitialLastName »

dragontamer wrote: post #61

Storytime. I had an online acquaintance who I practiced with in a fighting game called Blazblue. Said friend was also a martial-artist who also did live-steel fights. Dangerous, yes, but apparently there were rules about what weapons you could bring in, "first blood" and other such rules to try and keep things non-deadly. Anyway, one of his opponents used poison as his weapon, and now his hands were permanently F'd u…

It doesn't even have to be injories; a stroke can easily cause pretty much unpredictable amounts of fine motor control loss in one hand or the other, and that can happen to anyone at any time.

Re: A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

#64

Post by rhcom2 »

phaedrus wrote: post #62

When I was in junior high or highschool I made an SNES controller for my friend's mom who had limited hand movement due to a stroke. I made her a joystick from a piece of PVC pipe, two plastic spools, and a plastic case about the size of a cigar box for the base. The way the mechanism worked was I used strips of packing foam to center the PVC pipe inside the hole in the spools, and mounted 4 microswitches in a collar…

Awesome. Which games did she like?

Re: A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

#65

Post by phaedrus »

rhcom2 wrote: post #64
phaedrus wrote: post #62

When I was in junior high or highschool I made an SNES controller for my friend's mom who had limited hand movement due to a stroke. I made her a joystick from a piece of PVC pipe, two plastic spools, and a plastic case about the size of a cigar box for the base. The way the mechanism worked was I used strips of packing foam to center the PVC pipe inside the hole in the spools, and mounted 4 microswitches in a collar…

Awesome. Which games did she like?

I can't remember well now, but I think she mainly played Super Mario World, and perhaps an SNES racing game. I never got the chance to actually play with/against her, but my friend told me that she did use it.

Re: A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

#66

Post by wang_li »

vanderZwan wrote: post #60

All of the four controllers shown seem to be great, but it's funny that the joystick is basically just the Wii nunchuck. That's not a dig against Microsoft, I suspect Nintendo just really hit it out of the park with their Wii-mote design and that there isn't much else to improve. I'm left-handed, and I remember realising that without thinking, I had switched to using my right hand for the analog joystick instead of t…

>the first mainstream controller for a console that was fully ambidextrous.

While it's not a console as such, the Atari Lynx in the 1990s could be flipped over so that the joypad was on the other side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Lynx

Re: A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

#67

Post by gowld »

thomasfedb wrote: post #6

Can we swap "disabled people" for "people with disabilities" please?

"people with disabilities" was ~1990s "people-centered-language" linguistic trend. The current trend is "disability pride", not being ashamed of being called "disabled"

Re: A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

#68

Post by scoggs »

elefantastisch wrote: post #28
dalbasal wrote: post #27

Disabilities may be some sort of a starting point, but this sort of product/feature doesn't necessarily begin and end there. A controller is a UI paradigm, like the keyboard & mouse "desktop" paradigm. Serving a userbase that can't use a standard UI will lead to invention of new ones. This could easily lead to mass market products/features that people will want regardless of disabilities. Particularly interesting (to…

> Everyone has abilities, and limits to those abilities. Designing for people with permanent disabilities actually results in designs that benefit people universally. Constraints are a beautiful thing. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/design/inclusive

I was thinking how awesome it is when developers think of all sorts of players from the very start by ensuring that their entire game, game system, and controller systems are configured for full customization from the start.

It's something that I think every dev, that is capable, should be striving to do in everything they can (even outside of gaming specifically) but as you indicated above it's really awesome for EVERY kind of person, even if I'm not differently abled at all and all I want to do is swap shoot and reload's buttons because of my own personal (even it it's stupid and/or annoying) preference.

Re: A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

#69

Post by WorldMaker »

scoggs wrote: post #68
elefantastisch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone has abilities, and limits to those abilities. Designing for people with permanent disabilities actually results in designs that benefit people universally. Constraints are a beautiful thing. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/design/inclusive

I was thinking how awesome it is when developers think of all sorts of players from the very start by ensuring that their entire game, game system, and controller systems are configured for full customization from the start. It's something that I think every dev, that is capable, should be striving to do in everything they can (even outside of gaming specifically) but as you indicated above it's really awesome for EV…

One of the things that Microsoft's Inclusive Design efforts have made really usefully clear is that everyone is "differently abled" circumstantially/over-the-course of a day.

It's a silly example: but if I'm eating a sandwich one hand and trying to use a computer, in that moment I'm a one-handed computer user, and can benefit from many of the same one-handed benefits of someone using a computer one-handed for more permanent reasons.

But as silly as that example is, there are so many tiny moments in your day like that that maybe you dismiss them or you don't appreciate how differently abled you are at different points in the day.

It's a bit like thinking through the classic riddle of the sphinx ("what creature walks on four legs in the morning, two during the day, and three in the evening?"). Our "ableness" is never a static constant, and its so useful to think of all the more transient states we live in every day. The more we include everyone, sometimes the better we include ourselves, too.

Re: A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

#70

Post by scarface74 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #41
freeflight wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are lots of options in mouse selection, MMO mice can have dozens of buttons, the Roccat Nyth even allows replacing of the side-buttons with custom molds.

Also MMO keyboards / controllers and one-handed keyboards (like the Maltron)

I couldn't bring myself to pay $479 for a keyboard and then have to relearn how to type after spending close to forty years typing with one hand on a regular QWERTY keyboard. Last time I checked, I can type at about 50 wpm but since most of my typing is coding, as long as my typing speed can keep up with my thinking speed (with autocomplete), it's not the bottleneck.

This is my favorite keyboard:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VRC6U2C/ref=oh_aui_sear...

I can reach from the Q to the P with one hand and can touch type on it.

Post reply on HN