It was also probably never a huge priority for Sony until the X-box released their own and showed there's a market for them.
Yes. I think that's where it really matters to have something out in the world, even if it doesn't cover the full spectrum, so they get feedback on what sticks and what doesn't. Sure they can make the round of disabled people in their vicinity, and get some help for those wanting to engage with the dev process, but that can't be comparable to real world users actually getting their hands on a product.
On Sony's priorities, they've made so much research on input I hope they find a way to merge the two and have the feedback from one side help the development of the other "traditional" methods. Some games had custom controllers basically purpose built, so they're not strangers to doing stuff that doesn't scale that much either.
No it isn't. Unless the company doing the designing isn't serious about it. Exactly of companies who are serious about inclusive design are Apple, and if you want gaming Microsoft. How are they serious?
- hire people with disabilities across the board so input happens at all phases of product development
- include people with disabilities during product and focus group testing
- bake inclusive design as part of their process
- hire people with disabilities in QA/QC
So, yes it's difficult if you have one person saying "make this thing inclusive otherwise we might get sued". It's not difficult if the organization is serious about inclusive design
If we focus purely on the console gaming market, Microsoft did a lot for disabled people. Multiple different controllers and systems were released this generation.
Microsoft gets a lot of well deserved flack, but their peripherals were almost always top notch, in line with Logitech or even better. Remember their ergonomic split keyboards form the '90s?
Maybe some of that UX design heritage rubbed off to the X-box as well.
From what I (indirectly) understand, the Microsoft accessories team (keyboards, mice, etc) has been dismantled and reformed a number of times.
The XB1 controller is an extra odd situation, the team who was the Xbox 360 accessories team made the initial XB1 controller, and then that team became the Microsoft Band team, and an entire different team took over console controllers.
Sure, but from my experience, for devs and engineers to "just care" about the product, they also need to be well paid, respected and empowered.
Try seeing how many engineers care when they're overworked and underpaid.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/24/oculus-acquires-carbon-des...
The xbox org in general had a very high rate of contractor/vendor usage, I saw plenty of projects (including the one I was on) that had well over 50% of employees as vendors.
The design team I worked with was also a mix of MS employees and external designers, which makes a lot of sense.
I can tell you that in regards to the Xbox 1 controller, Microsoft employees spent a lot of time showing love and care to it, those buttons and control sticks got a ton of critique from people who really care about gaming. I remember one particular test session for haptic feedback settings, everyone there wanted to make damned sure that if you were driving over gravel in Forza that it felt like you were really driving over gravel.
I can speak more to the Microsoft Band. The springs on the buttons were iterated on for months, with dozens upon dozens of combinations of springs and button materials being tested to find what felt just right, down to the exact shape of the indent on the button.
Every single letter for the font was hand kerned. Heck the font was customized for our exact display (DPI, font weights, letter heights, everything). My team worked with Monotype to get real TrueType font rendering working in 96mhz and 256KB of RAM (and a slow 4MB scratch buffer). Real antialiasing, full CJK support, when Microsoft wants to pay attention to details they can do a really damn good job of paying attention to the details.
Xbox was (is, I presume, haven't been there in a long time!) an entire technical org that was passionate from top to bottom about making the best products.
If they wanted to do this earlier, they could have.
Kind of.
Apple isn't serious about inclusive design in hardware. Their software UX leads are some of the most brilliant figures in the fight for accessible computing, but their hardware is almost universally bad for accessibility. For people with sufficiently-advanced dyskinesia, even the most generous software accessibility settings aren't super helpful. It took them thirteen major releases of their operating system to offer pointer events using external hardware, broken pointer events, which was more or less the only way in which people with motor disabilities could make the system usable at all.
If Apple is an example of disabled people in an organization being serious about inclusive design in a way that is "easy," then that reflects incredibly poorly on the disabled engineers and designers working at Apple and the possibilities of inclusive design as a liberating force.
People at Microsoft worked hard on the Adaptive Controller. It was hard, and it took years. It is an incredible feat of empathy in engineering.
i have heard high praise for apple with their accessibility settings and my colleagues and friend who use these options seem to like them, so there’s something. really hope that the hardware focus continues to get traction as just “something that should be done” not as a new revenue stream. i thjnk proper accessibility and customization serves everyone, not just those with disabilities [0]. technology should be adaptable to any given user, not the other way around.
0 - i’m actually not sure if this is right wording but my brain struggles to know the preferred term. i am happy to have a better way to describe people with disabilities
'Disabled', in particular, has two differing politically charged usages and definitions. That is, whether one is disabled by their impairments or by society. It surprises most people that the latter is "more correct", being the Unesco[0] definition. It's also the more empathetic, in my opinion.
There are many opinions about this, and there is no collective preferred term.
Another book I have read explained the "person first" approach to describing disabilities, and it makes sense as I can see how it's very much so on dependent on the individual preferences.