After a week of rumours and leaked images, Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller is finally official – and it works with Windows 10 PCs, too. Designed to let people with limited mobility play games with their own button, joystick and switch setups, the controller is a fantastic step toward making games more accessible to those who can’t use a traditional Xbox controller or mouse and keyboard. Read the rest of this entry »
The AbleGamers Foundation, an American charity who help people with disabilities to play games by giving them controllers which suit their needs, have launched a new initiative to help improve accessibility problems in games. Their Player Panels will connect developers and researchers to people with disabilities as accessibility testers. Hopefully this scheme will lead to more games being open to more players – and from the start, rather than having accessibility options patched in. Read the rest of this entry »
World of Warcraft‘s 6.1 patch will add a more robust suite of options for colour blind players to use while in Azeroth. Blizzard have had a colourblind mode in World of Warcraft [official site] for a few years now but the next patch will bring a new set of filter and strength options to better cater for people with colour vision deficiencies.
We all know what the bestest best games of 2014 are, and that there can be no disagreement about them. Sadly, a fair few of those will be difficult to play for people with mobility issues, colour blindness, or other disabilities. Celebrating games open to more people, the charity AbleGamers has declared its Accessible Game of the Year winners and runners-up. The PC is well-represented, but one surprising winner is one of the year’s most physically-demanding games: Platinum’s Bayonetta 2. I think it’s well worth us having a nosey at, even if it is a console game.
![[Gordon Freeman: ]](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/14/oct/halflifesubtitles.jpg)
Hold on a second, chums. Look at that screenshot again. That’s the opening scene of Half-Life with subtitles. Pretty important atmosphere-setting, isn’t it, that train ride narration? It makes Black Mesa seem so much bigger than us. Half-Life used an awful lot of speech to reveal what was going on, from our one-sided conversations with scientists to soldiers yelling at each other. Here I pull off an incredibly adept pull-back-and-reveal: those subtitles were added by a mod which only came out this year. A new version’s now out, with new ways to make this side accessible to folks who can’t or don’t want to hear it.
