“How do you play video games?” is a question Ben gets asked a lot.

The answer isn’t as simple as you might think, because he can’t see.

Ben – who prefers to be known as Sightless Kombat, or SK – is a gamer without sight who regularly streams on Twitch.

As you might expect, he gets lots of questions from followers, and has set up a chatbot to answer some of the common ones.

“Even using the term gamer without sight, as much as you might think it clears things up, it doesn’t always make it absolutely crystal clear for some people,” he says.

To play his favourite titles, SK relies on audio cues, tweaks to in-game options and “occasionally, a fair amount of practice”.

And SK likes a challenge – on his YouTube channel you can see him tackling God of War Ragnarök on the hardest difficulty, taking down “the two hardest optional bosses in the game”.

“I’ve had a lot of people come in and just be very friendly, very curious, very interested, watching me and saying ‘wait, you can’t see and you’re better than I am at this’.

“So that’s always a fun compliment to have paid, regardless of how true or not it may be,” he says.

As well as building up a following, he’s become an advocate for gamers without sight, working with the RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People), and he also provides advice to developers on ways to make their titles more accessible.

Since SK first got into gaming – “pressing buttons at random and nosediving planes” – he says there’s been a lot of progress in the industry, but there’s still work to do.

One problem he often sees is accessibility features implemented in one area of a game, but not in another, and that’s somewhere he’d like to see improvements.

He says a good example is a failure to combine menu narration – where a voice reads out text in settings screens – and navigation assist, where the game will automatically guide your character through a level.

Without menu narration, SK needs assistance from a sighted person to set it up, and without navigation assist, it’s hard to progress.

“So those two almost go hand in hand in a way that a lot of people might not think of initially,” he says.

Getting people to think about accessibility is Cari Watterton’s job.

She’s the senior accessibility designer at Rebellion – the UK studio behind the popular Sniper Elite and Evil Genius series.

Cari and SK have been working together on a prototype called Project BlackKat – a stealth game that replaces a visual radar with “auditory vision cones” that reveal an enemy’s location through sound.

But Cari’s role is also about catering to the “massive spectrum of capabilities” in the world, which includes everything from motor impairments to cognitive issues.

Both her and SK agree the industry’s approach to accessibility is inconsistent, and one of the big misconceptions is that it costs a lot to implement.

Cari says this doesn’t have to be the case, and she was able to get two “high-impact” features into Rebellion’s Sniper Elite 5 when she joined the studio a month before its release.

Despite limited time and budget, she says the game launched with automatic forward movement and automatic traversal – interactions that usually require holding down buttons for extended periods.

Cari says this can make make a big difference for people with dexterity issues.

“The fact we were able to get that in and have people be able to come in and have more energy saved for the actual sniping side of the game was fantastic,” she says.

Cari says other tweaks, like making sure visual feedback is always paired with audio feedback, can be relatively cheap to do, especially if accessibility is baked into the development process from the start.

She says the other misconception is “people thinking that they need to do everything at once”, but says it’s a case of developers “working step by step” within the limits of what they can achieve.

“Even putting the smallest thing in, even if it’s super late in the process, it helps and it’s a step forward,” she says.

Accessibility is a hot topic in gaming at the moment.

The upcoming Game Awards has a category dedicated to it, gaming giant Electronic Arts recently opened up some of its development tools to other companies, and Sony has just capped things off by releasing its adaptive controller for disabled gamers.

But sites like Game Accessibility Nexus and Can I Play That? – which review games based on their assistance features – often find big releases lacking.

Cari admits “there are big goals and there are big things that are going to take more time”, but says 2023 has been a “really, really good year for accessibility” in the industry.

She says there have been more games to celebrate this year, and more studios are recruiting into accessibility roles – and she hopes there will be more roles for people with lived experience of disability.

For her, for now, it’s one of the best jobs in gaming.

“Seeing it reach more people, seeing it reach a wider audience, hearing people being like ‘thank you so much for putting this in here, I can play this now’.

“It’s so rewarding, because you don’t want anybody to be left out,” she says.

SK is also optimistic about the future.

“It helps far more people than most would actually think is even possible in terms of having accessibility features in a game,” he says.

“Everybody should be able to play, whatever your your situation is, because when everybody plays, we all win.

“So get your accessibility consultants involved worldwide, get people testing your game from all walks of life with all sorts of challenges, and you will find barriers that need to be sorted out.

“And as you sort those things out, you’ll be helping so so many people in your wider audience, you may not even know it.”

Sony has teamed up with accessibility experts to release a PlayStation 5 controller for disabled gamers.

The Access Controller is a “highly customisable kit” of different buttons, triggers and sticks that lets players create a set-up that suits their needs.

Microsoft’s Adaptive Controller, which can be used on Xbox and PC, has been on the market since 2018.

But this is the first device of its type to be specifically designed by Sony for the PS5.

“The idea is that you unbox it and you can start using it right away as a PlayStation controller,” Alvin Daniel, Senior Technical Program Manager at Sony Interactive Entertainment, told the BBC.

“To the extent that this works for you and is comfortable for you, there is no need for you to purchase additional third party accessories and buttons and wire it all together.

“We wanted an all-inclusive kit in a box.”

But designing accessibility products is a massive task, as every disabled person’s impairment is unique to them, and gaming technology is always evolving.

Sony’s plan to tackle this problem is through customisation – making it possible for each person to tailor the solution to their own individual requirements.

Mr Daniel said the firm had teamed up with accessibility experts AbleGamers in the US to find ways round that problem.

“When they came up with their own bespoke solutions for various players, they would inevitably try to address three issues – the thumbsticks, pressing buttons, or having to hold the controller.

“If you have challenges in those three areas, this controller will help regardless of your underlying condition.”

How it plays

By Paul Carter, Technology reporter

All aspects of the Access Controller have clearly been designed with the input of the disabled community.

Even the packaging is accessible, and the setup process, while clunky at times, lets people adapt the controller to their own specific requirements, and even create different profiles for different games or situations.

As a disabled gamer myself, I waited years for button remapping to become the norm so I was able to play games that rely heavily on the trigger buttons usually placed at the back of a traditional controller, and be able to map them to a more accessible button.

But this was always a workaround rather than a solution. This controller makes that a more accessible reality.

There are however one or two design decisions that are, at best, bewildering – for example, it doesn’t feature a right stick that is standard on all modern controllers and fairly essential to many genres of game.

I tried to play Spider-Man 2 – which has a Deaf character – and it was practically unplayable. The only solutions are to use the Access Controller alongside a regular PS5 controller, which is an unwieldy set-up, or use two Access Controllers together – which becomes an expensive solution.

That said, this product, and others like it, are a positive step forward for disabled gamers. That it exists, and that it has been co-designed with and for disabled people shows that gaming accessibility is now a mainstream issue.

I hope that this is the start of an evolution of these types of products, and that manufacturers listen to feedback and continue to iterate and innovate.

The gaming industry has been under pressure to make improvements for disabled players.

In the last few years, racing sim Forza Horizon 5 introduced a sign language feature, the Last of Us Part II has a mode for blind and deaf players, and Just Dance has a routine suitable for players in wheelchairs.

But the hardware options have been slim for those with disabilities, and Mr Daniel said Sony’s new controller was about addressing that.

“I think particularly if you’re a young person today, gaming is such a big part of popular culture, that you are socially isolated or you’re left behind if you can’t participate in the same experiences your friends or your schoolmates are doing”, he said.

“We have seen that we bring joy to players who couldn’t play before.”