Gamers With Disabilities Battle Indifferent Industry

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Chuck Bittner is one of the most prominent advocates for adding accessibility to videogames.
Photo: Chuck Bittner


Bittner has quadriplegia, a type of paralysis that limits the functionality of his arms. His hands can only reach certain buttons on standard Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game controllers – he can't use two joysticks at once, for example.




"[Button customization] truly would help many disabled gamers ... enjoy games more fully," said Bittner – who goes by the handles AskACapper and ONLYUSEmeFACE – in an e-mail to




"So many games are using button combinations that make it almost impossible for all but the most practiced able-bodied person to play a game, much less a disabled person," Barlet said in an e-mail. "Just because you can use all the buttons at once does not mean you should."

Pushing for Accessibility



He's probably the most high-profile gamer calling for increased accessibility. A fellow gamer even wrote a song about him, immortalizing Bittner's quest in a YouTube video (above). "You see our friend Chuck/He dreams of Kinect/But he suffers from the quadriplegic effect," sings the songwriter, who goes by Typhoon Boon.

Despite the obvious benefits to disabled gamers, it's not that easy to get developers to commit to the cause.

"These are not features that nobody has ever done before, or features that need lots of exploration and research," said game designer Matthew Burns, who has worked on titles in the Call of Duty and Halo series, in an e-mail. The problem, he says, is that accessibility options are often the first thing cut during crunch time, when time and money are at a premium.

Another oft-requested accessibility feature is closed-captioning. Most games include subtitles for spoken dialog, but that's only half of the auditory experience. In many games, nonverbal sound cues can be essential for success. AbleGamers' Barlet says text-based representations of a full spectrum of sounds and visual cues would be immensely helpful for the hearing-impaired.

Game designer Reid Kimball, who has worked on titles like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Tony Hawk: Ride, said it's sad how rare closed captioning is in games.

"It’s cheap to develop compared to other game technology," Kimball told in an e-mail. "The players love having it as an option and there’s tons of opportunity to innovate in this space."


"The technology can be used in subsequent games across the entire studio and it doesn’t age, unlike expensive graphics-rendering technologies," Kimball said.

But there are still snags in the process, says Matthew Burns, now the head of Shadegrown Games. The detailed nature of closed captions usually means a game must be completely finished before developers can add them, he said. By that point, there's often no time left in the schedule.

"Most of the games that I have seen finish with barely enough time to put all of the audio in, let alone [closed captioning] on top of that," he said.



"It will continue to be piecemeal and slow unless a large, influential company took a stand and made a conscientious effort to be better about this stuff across the board," said Shadegrown's Burns. "That would be the turning point."

'What game creators do not truly understand is that as we get older, we are more likely to be disabled.'AbleGamers' Barlet says hardware makers hold the most power. Should Microsoft mandate that all Xbox 360 games ship with certain accessibility options, developers would have no choice but to make them a priority. But he doesn't see this happening.


Still, the issue's not going away.

"What game creators do not truly understand is that as we get older, we are more likely to be disabled," Barlet said. "We have two wars going on, and our soldiers are not all coming back in the same condition as they left. Those men and women are gamers."

See Also: - How a Blind Gamer Plays Zelda by Ear