How Microsoft has reinvented its Xbox controller to fit everyone

Mike Luckett is a lifetime player.

He started at the age of 5 almost three decades ago, joining his older brother who played Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo Entertainment System. In a few years, he was playing games like the Nazi Idiot Prison Shooter in 1992, Wolfenstein 3D, and the sci-fi follow-up hit Doom.

Over the years, Luckett has collected a lot of
consoles
including 1988 Sega Genesis,
Sony
PlayStation, 2005 Xbox 360 and 2017
Xbox One X
. One of his favorite games was Vectorman, a shoot-up adventure in which you're a robot protecting the Earth from an uprising of evil robots.

But everything changed after the accident.

Luckett had been deployed overseas and had worked in Iraq Army Logistics from 2010 to March 2011, when he returned home. A few months later, in August, he was driving a motorcycle when things went wrong. The accident severed his C6 spinal cord, leaving him unable to use his legs. While he can move his hands, he has lost control of his fingers.

And he could no longer use a computer. "I could not even run, using the keys or using a trackpad or any other element," said Luckett.

But he was really frustrated when he realized that he was anxious to try
Activision
Overwatch, Blizzard's 2016 team-based shooter, required him to use a controller that he could not physically handle. Luckett said it was when he almost decided to leave
to play
.

He was not the first player to face physical challenges. Since almost the beginning of the industry,
video games
were built with some basic badumptions about the players: They can hear, they can see and they have two hands that work fully. The first video game controllers, like Atari and Nintendo, were designed with joysticks and buttons.

To help them play on their own terms, some people in the disability community hacked into solutions by breaking down the controllers and attaching buttons, switches, and other gadgets – changes that they allowed to send signals the game using their feet or elbows, pbading their heads against a button or even blowing into a tube. But the construction of specialized controllers is expensive, expensive and time consuming. Worse, the installation process does not always work.

Enter the Xbox Adaptive Controller

Now there is something that can help Luckett and others like him to really get back into the game.

That's the Xbox Adaptive Controller from
Microsoft
. The $ 100 device, which will go on sale later this year, is designed to help players of all shapes, sizes, and abilities to play as much as they can on an Xbox One or a powered PC. by Windows 10 . It offers ports in which players can plug switches, buttons, pressure sensitive tubes and other equipment to control any function that a standard controller can perform. Microsoft unveiled it in May, before World Accessibility Awareness Day, when design and development communities are focusing their efforts on learning and sharing ideas on the topic. construction of products for the disabled.

"We just saw 2 billion people playing video games on this planet," Phil Spencer the head of the Microsoft Xbox team, said in an interview. "As an industry, when you start to adopt this kind of impact law in terms of the broad base of people who interact with your art form, I think we have a social responsibility .

Other technological firms also highlight the inclusivity and accessibility for GAAD . Apple, for example, has announced that blind and deaf communities across the United States will be able to access a specially designed program called Everyone Can Code for Swift in Schools. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Adobe and Oath have partnered to launch an accessibility program as part of the TeachAccess initiative.

sitting in his wheelchair in an accessibility lab Microsoft built in his building Studio B at his headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Luckett showed me that this effort was made for him. Since he does not have the use of his fingers, the 32-year-old man with the soft voice needs both hands to hold a controller. If he wants to press a button or press the joystick, he has to press the controller against something and then raise his hand to do the job. If the controller needs three or four fingers at a time, there is no way.

The key feature of the Xbox Adaptive Controller is that it has ports on the back that represent each button on a standard controller. So, if Luckett needs the right trigger button to be placed right next to his elbow, for example, he can put one there and then plug it into the back of the adaptive controller. Now all he has to do is press the button, and he saves as he had pulled the trigger of a standard controller.

I watched it when it launched Fortnite, the shooter of the Royal Battle of Epic Games. As soon as it starts, it plays like anybody on the screen. You could never say that he was using a controller with two big buttons near his wrist in addition to a separate controller. He is always able to move fast and eliminate opponents better than ever.

"It's a really cool escape," he said. "You can immerse yourself in a world in which you do not get involved normally."

He does not hide his handicap. His player name is MikeTheQuad .

Players of All Kinds

Video games speak as much about escape as entertainment. One minute you sit at home after a long day at school or at work, the next time you fly a spaceship through an epic air combat in a distant galaxy.

For some people with disabilities, and especially Generation Y (the older of which is near 40), gambling is not just a hobby; it's part of their identity. And until the arrival of Microsoft, they have always accepted that this activity they enjoyed could never work well enough for them.

"Do not over emphasize that someone has to sit there and watch someone else set up the device and wait for 30 minutes to turn on the device, "said Scott Wang, an Xbox hardware researcher. . Sometimes jerry-faked buttons work. But sometimes, one of them does not do it, so people have to go through a frustrating ordeal, troubleshooting what is not working and why.

"Microsoft's inspiration with the Xbox Adaptive Controller was to remove as many limitations as possible to the game," Wang said.

A normal controller is small enough to fit in a coat pocket but big enough to be comfortable in your hands. It's designed to be ergonomic, with edges that slide naturally in your palms, which position your thumbs on the top buttons and your pointing and middle fingers on the side and bottom triggers.

The Xbox Adaptive Controller, which was called Zephyr, is completely different.

It's a rectangle just a little smaller than a tablet and it can easily rest on your lap. There are also four big sticky rubber feet, to make sure they do not slip on a table. And the device is tilted, with a slightly larger back, to make it easier for people who will play with their feet.

In an age of super-thin
laptop
and
tablets
The Xbox Adaptive Controller looks tough. The device is mainly white on cream on the top and on the sides.

It is also black on the bottom, so it looks good even with Velcro attached. Why is it important? Therapists say that their patients hate when things seem to be for people with disabilities.

On the top are two large black circular buttons that are easy to trigger with even the slightest touch on their side. To their left is a directional pad of about 150% of the size of a standard controller. And there are a few buttons above the pad to share recordings in the game with friends and turn on and off the Xbox console remotely. One of the buttons allows you to choose between saved profiles in case you have setups for different people in your house – or even want to play different types of games.

The real magic is in the back and on the sides. There are two open USB connections and 19 ports that accept a standard 3.5mm cord (the size of the plug for your headphones) that can receive signals from switches, flywheels, pressure-sensitive tubes and other devices. invented to make it easier to type, control computers and play video games.

To make it as easy to use as possible, Microsoft has designed the controller with grooves over the ports, so if you get around its back, you can easily find what you need with your fingers. There are also corresponding marks on the top of the controller to guide you to the ports on the sides. And there is enough room to add labels too.

Microsoft has designed the controller with a rechargeable battery that lasts about 25 hours so that players do not have to rummage with a battery cover when it has no more juice.

On a standard controller, "it's not easy to get out the door, replace the batteries and put them back in place," said Yaron Galitzky, a general manager responsible for efforts on Xbox devices Microsoft. Microsoft has also chosen to offer a load with a relatively new take-up design called USB-C that works no matter if you use it backwards or upwards. ;towards. "We looked at every feature of the traditional controller and we designed it as the best way to accessibility," Galitzky said.

Microsoft has even changed the way the controller will be delivered, by designing new packaging with buckles and flaps that allow people with mobility issues to remove and install them unbadisted.

Microsoft hopes the result will be one that is easily customizable, a controller that can become what you need so that when you turn on an Xbox or a PC, the difference will not be any better. ;importance. For the game, it's just another standard controller.

"We are not trying to design for each of us, we are trying to design for each of us," said Bryce Johnson, a senior designer with inclusivity on the subject. Microsoft Xbox team. "If we design for people who have a unique need, it benefits everyone."

Accessibility Culture

In recent years, the technology industry has been paying new attention to accessibility.
Apple
added programming to his Apple Watch to track the daily movements of wheelchair users. Apple and
Google
has added a wide range of features and applications to facilitate listening and playback of his phones and other devices. Facebook teaches his computers to describe photos to blind people .

Microsoft created things like a portable engine designed to detect tremors in patients with Parkinson's disease and then shake them in an opposite movement, allowing them to do simple things like sign their name or hold a cup of coffee. The world's largest software maker has also developed a free application called Seeing AI that describes everything you put in there – whether reading a restaurant menu for you or identifying how much money you are holding.

And in his Xbox group, the company released last year a feature called Copilot that allows people to use two controllers to play with a character. This made a success with parents and young children who wanted to play together. It also helped disabled players to more comfortably use two controllers in different positions, or even to mix a pirated controller with special buttons and a standard controller.

Meanwhile, she found an unexpected success in the disability community with her Xbox Elite Wireless Controller which included four paddles inside the handles that acted as additional buttons to facilitate the task of the players. For example, press the buttons without removing their thumbs from the joysticks. But as many pieces, such as these joysticks, are replaceable, accessibility advocates have discovered that they can create rooms that are adapted to the needs of disabled players.

The Xbox Adaptive Controller is a next step, acting as a controller that is also a hub for almost any specialized button, switch or joystick made for someone with a disability.

While developing the device, Microsoft worked with non-profit organizations like Warfighter Engaged, for which Luckett works as a social media manager, as well as the AbleGamers Foundation, SpecialEffect, The Cerebral Palsy Foundation and Craig Hospital, among others.

Part of the reason why Microsoft has invested in this technology is a changing culture in the business, said Jenny Lay-Flurrie, head of accessibility efforts. "It's the principle of inclusive design," she said, which means that the needs of the disability community are taken into account throughout the design process and not just at the end . The process, she said, is "to think about how this product will work for a human being, including the part that is diverse – be it gender, disability or anything else".

Lay-Flurrie, who became deaf after an episode of measles followed by a series of ear infections in her childhood, pushed to change Microsoft's culture towards the world. inclusivity since his arrival in the company almost twenty years ago. One of the first projects she worked on came from a hackathon, in which one team created a wheelchair that you can control with your eyes.

Its goal is to get engineers to consider people's disabilities not as ills for which they need to create special designs, but as a challenge to make the technology even easier to use.

"The best way to describe this is: the World Health Organization defines" disability "as a mismatch between the individual and the environment, she said. "For the most part, I'm not broken, some may not agree, I have a disability that gives me an offset."

During my stay on the Microsoft campus, I heard the definition of the OMS repeated by several people, even outside of the accessibility team. business. The message seems to be pbading.

"This is not a huge profit driver for us," said Xbox Spencer's chief. "It's really about knowing how we're going to make sure we're building something that is additive, constructive and that attracts more players."

This is certainly the case of Luckett, who said that the Xbox Adaptive Controller allowed him to plunge even further into his pbadion for video games. These games act both as a social outlet and a way to sharpen his mind when he plays real world sports like wheelchair rugby. "I was already mentally difficult and I was able to do it," he said.

As for the next game, he is looking forward to playing, it's the Western epic of Rockstar Games, Red Dead Redemption 2, which will be released. this October.

"I'm really excited to be able to play a game where I can really immerse myself, and have this personification of being a cowboy without a quote," he said.

And where he might have worried about knowing if he could even play, the use of the new Microsoft controller means that he will just be able to focus on the fun.

First published on May 16th at 10 pm PT
Update at 22:45. PT : Addition of information from Jenny Lay-Flurrie interview of Microsoft
Update May 17 at 7:55 PT : Adding information about the Day global awareness of accessibility.
Update May 18 at 05:00 PT : Added information and clarification on compatibility with Windows PCs.
Update July 25 at 7:00 PT : Addition information about the shipping box of the aircraft

On Equal Footing : A Interview with Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Accessibility Manager at Microsoft, about how design in technology is changing.

Tech Enabled: CNET tells the role of technology in providing new types of accessibility.