The Launch Of The Access Controller For PlayStation 5 Is A Really Big Deal For Gamers And Tech Journalists Alike

As The Verge’s Jon Porter notes, Sony’s long-anticipated and much-ballyhooed Access Controller for PlayStation 5 officially went on sale today. The $90 peripheral is intended to help make playing PS5 games accessible to disabled people. Sony’s newest device is the analogue to Microsoft’s own critically acclaimed Adaptive Controller for Xbox.

Sony’s senior vice president of platform experiences, Hideaki Nishino, wrote a blog post about the Access Controller’s launch and “celebrating inclusivity.” In addition, Sony posted a video to YouTube featuring some of the people from the disability community with whom the company consulted in developing the product since work began in 2018.

“Five years ago, we started our journey by engaging experts and organizations like AbleGamers, Stack-Up and SpecialEffect, as well as PlayStation Studios, to help us craft a novel controller design that could deliver broad impact for the accessibility community,” Nishino wrote in part. “Thanks to their input, and drawing from 28 years of [Sony Interactive Entertainment’s] design expertise and playtests with dozens of participants across three continents, we created a highly customizable accessibility controller kit that works ‘out of the box’ to help gamers with disabilities play more comfortably and for longer periods.”

Today’s launch is a denouement of sorts for the Access Controller, what with Sony’s five years of research and development time and my months of on-and-off coverage for this column. Back in October, I published a deep dive into the aforementioned research and development of the Access Controller. My story featured an interview with senior technical program manager Alvin Daniel, as well as details about my brief time with the Access Controller—I played Gran Turismo on a PS5 set up for our meeting—during a hands-on briefing at Sony’s Foster City campus some weeks ago. In a nutshell, the Access Controller exists as a solution for gamers for whom the standard DualSense controller is inaccessible. The Access Controller enables players to express themselves within games by “[bolstering] that kind of final element in the chain of the game console and controller input into the console,” Daniel said to me.

Following the briefing, Sony sent me an Access Controller (and PS5 console) prior to Thanksgiving for more testing. In lieu of a traditional review, suffice it to say the most striking part about using the Access Controller literally lies on the horizontal plane. Nishino notes is his blog post the Access Controller is highly modular and easily customizable to fit one’s needs and tolerances; Sony has made the buttons and joystick swappable so as to build the perfect controller as though it were a Lego set. My vision and motor acuities are such that I don’t necessarily need much in the way of configurability. What I found the Access Controller tremendously useful in was that I could use the thing without holding it.

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In my decades of playing games on everything from an original Nintendo and Sega Genesis to a Dreamcast and my old PS4 Pro, using the various systems meant I needed to hold a controller in my hands. It’s something I can do in an absolute sense, but it’s never been the most comfortable. This is because the partial paralysis in my hands, caused by cerebral palsy, makes it such that I need to hold things akin to Darth Vader’s Force Choke—which is to say, so tightly that I’d almost squeeze the life out of it were it an animate object. By contrast, the Access Controller is designed to be used on a table or wheelchair tray or even in one’s lap if possible. In this way, I can play games with more fluidity and dexterity because I needn’t constantly readjust my grip to accommodate for fatigue. As ever with accessibility, it’s a small detail that makes a big difference in shaping the overall user experience of using the PS5.

At a higher, decidedly more amorphous level, the advent of the Access Controller is a seminal moment for Sony and for the gaming industry. During our interview, Daniel told me PlayStation’s marketing tagline that “play has no limits” is a double entendre. It not only speaks to the power of the PS5 hardware itself, it also alludes to the disability community and, with the Access Controller in tow, breaks barriers in gaming. That Sony (and Microsoft, for that matter) has invested so heavily in making their respective consoles more accessible isn’t small potatoes; accessibility in video games matters as much as any other facet of technology. (Lest anyone forgets that Apple supports the Xbox Adaptive Controller in iOS/iPadOS/tvOS for services like Apple Arcade.)

Jaded journalists might look at Sony’s announcement and cynically say Sony’s claim of celebrating inclusivity is mere marketing ploy to hawk their wares. However true to a certain degree, what is missed by such an unfeeling viewpoint is the Access Controller truly is a vehicle through which using the PS5 is more equitable and inclusive. None of this is to say the Access Controller is above criticism and beyond reproach. The salient point should be that its sheer existence is incredibly meaningful and should not be sneered at under the guise of so-called objectivity.

Like with using an iPhone or iPad or MacBook, everyone doesn’t use video games the same way. That’s why accessibility coverage in tech journalism is so crucially important. It exists to enlighten use cases that extend far beyond the usual scope of Geekbench scores, camera compares, and the like. The Access Controller is no different.

If you’re disabled and have a PlayStation 5, today is your day.