Access controller for PS5 interview: how the highly customizable kit was created
The Access controller for PS5 will be released on December 6 and will enable gamers with disabilities to play more comfortably and for longer periods. The development of the highly customizable kit is a fascinating one, incorporating guidance and insight from experts across multiple disciplines. To coincide with today’s reveal of the controller’s accessible packaging and its design story, I sat down with Senior Technical Program Manager Alvin Daniel to talk the development process behind the Access controller for PS5.
See below for excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
PlayStation Blog: Walk us through your development approach. How did the Access controller come to be?
Alvin Daniel, senior technical program manager for the Access controller: We had a mission to create a controller that helps players with disabilities. And at first, when we started the project, it seemed so daunting. How does one go about creating an accessible controller, given the diversity and different conditions and disabilities that exist?
And so the team started out with a very classic approach, which is, you know, we will look at census data, we’ll look at medical data and try to understand like, what are the most prevalent conditions of disabilities that exist, and we’ll try to solve for those.
And so we went down that path. And it turns out, that’s not very effective, for two big reasons. The first is that no two people experience disability in exactly the same way. And this point was driven home, we had a very early test group, where we had two players come in, and both of them had cerebral palsy. And the first player… he was in a wheelchair, he didn’t have a whole lot of arm strength. But he had a lot of
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