I was born with Cerebral Palsy. I can’t walk and have very limited use of my hands. I love video games of all shapes and sizes and have been playing since I was 3 years old. I just wanted to thank you, Blizzard, for having near endless control customization in Overwatch. I don’t know if this was your goal, but because of your extensive options I am able to play every character in the roster and it feels great. Because of you I made my first snipe in a video game today.
Zak, via Reddit
I have now just the right arm, I have not been able to enjoy many games for this reason. I was going to uninstall the game, like all other games when I see that I can not play them, then I found the control options. I was overjoyed.
LuisMiguel Maldonado, via Twitter
Standard for PC games but rare on consoles, remappable controls are one of the best value accessibility features. Many people with motor impairments, whether permanent (eg. stroke), temporary (eg. broken arm) or situational (talking on a phone while playing) benefit greatly from being able to move essential controls into positions that they are able to reach more easily, for example with a single hand, or resting on a table-top using only the top buttons.
It also benefits the significant numbers of people who simply have different preferences to those of the designer, or those with different hardware layouts such as an AZERTY keyboard or Japanese PlayStation controller.
Presets are useful, particularly for saving effort configuring commonly used button layouts. But they cannot provide for all needs, so ideally offer both – a set of profiles together with a “custom” option, which allows full remapping.
There is a common misconception that remappable controls result in TCR/TRC certification issues. This is not true. It does not, for example, affect requirements about X/O use, or about multiple triggers –
You can remap buttons to your liking in Borderlands 2 on PS Vita. I mapped Sprint to O and Melee to triangle ?
Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony Worldwide Studios
Consoles now provide remapping at system level. In-game remapping has many benefits over it, for example allowing in-game prompts to reflect the current mapping, being able to map different classes or walking/driving separately, and even the simple usability of the settings being where players expect to find them, rather than hidden away in a platform system menu. System level remap is provided as a safety net, not as a substitute for providing remap in-game –
Even though we offer at the console level the abillity to do this custom remapping, it’s very important that we continue to ask game developers to insert remapping into their games.
Bryce Johnson, Xbox
Best practice examples:
Tools
Additional information
Category & Level:
- Motor (Basic)