The Release of The PlayStation 5 Access Controller Is a Major Event for Both Tech Journalists and Gamers

Today marked the official release date of Sony’s much anticipated and awaited PlayStation 5 Access Controller, as reported by Jon Porter of The Verge. The $90 add-on is meant to assist in enabling impaired individuals to play PS5 games. The latest gadget from Sony is a rival to Microsoft’s highly regarded Adaptive Controller for Xbox.

In a blog post, Hideaki Nishino, senior vice president of platform experiences at Sony, discussed the release of the Access Controller and “celebrating inclusivity.” Furthermore, since the product’s development began in 2018, Sony has collaborated with members of the disability community, some of whom are featured in a YouTube video that the business has uploaded.

According to Nishino, “We began our journey five years ago by enlisting professionals and organizations like AbleGamers, Stack-Up, and SpecialEffect, as well as PlayStation Studios, to help us craft a novel controller design that could deliver broad impact for the accessibility community.” As a result of their suggestions, as well as 28 years of [Sony Interactive Entertainment’s] design experience and playtests involving dozens of participants on three continents, we were able to develop a highly customizable accessibility controller kit that enables gamers with disabilities to play more comfortably and for longer stretches of time right out of the box.

With Sony dedicating five years of research and development work to the Access Controller and me covering it intermittently for this column for months, today’s unveiling represents a sort of finale for the device. I wrote a detailed analysis of the Access Controller’s research and development back in October. In my piece, I described my brief encounter with the Access Controller—during a hands-on briefing at Sony’s Foster City headquarters a few weeks ago, I played Gran Turismo on a PS5 set up for our meeting—as well as my conversation with senior technical program manager Alvin Daniel. To put it briefly, the Access Controller is meant to help players who are unable to use the conventional DualSense controller. According to Daniel, the Access Controller “[bolsters] that kind of final element in the chain of the game console and controller input into the console,” allowing players to express themselves within games.