How the PS5's DualSense Controller Fails Disabled Gamers

Expand / The DualSense Edge offers some nice improvements for professional PS5 gamers, but not the extra accessibility that gamers need. disabled need. On the opening night of August's Gamescom conference, PlayStation announced its new PlayStation 5 controller, the DualSense Edge. With the new iteration, gamers can remap inputs and save them as custom profiles and even replace physical buttons and add levers to the back of the controller.

While these changes provide some level of accessibility, neither the announcement nor the accompanying blog post suggest this was deliberate. Rather, the DualSense Edge is a “high-performance, ultra-customizable” gamepad ostensibly aimed at competitive gamers. At its heart, the Edge remains the same old DualSense, and as such its accessibility improvements seem accidental rather than intended.

This has somewhat disappointed advocates of game accessibility and gamers who rely on non-standard controls. In the wake of Microsoft's success with the Xbox Adaptive Controller, the lack of similarly accessible control options for the PlayStation 5 is starting to feel like a sore thumb.

Sony's lane or the highway

The DualSense is an unwieldy tool. Compared to its predecessor, the DualShock 4, it spreads inputs over a much wider area with a much heavier chassis. “The DualSense is just too big,” says Thomas Russell, a longtime gamer with spinal muscular atrophy type 2. “The biggest issue for me is that it's too wide; it's also too bulky."

Many gamers with disabilities report that due to the PS5's reliance on DualSense, they are unable to use their consoles as intended. Krissie A.—who wishes to keep her last name anonymous—is a reliability engineer. When using the DualSense, she says the size and spacing of the inputs cause her significant hand pain in just 20 minutes. "I haven't been able to play any PS5 games," she says, "resorting to watching my husband play the games instead."

USB devices like the Titan 2 allow easy connection control tools accessible by third parties. But these tools are now banned on the PS5 in an attempt to limit cheating in online games. The DualSense Edge may be a small step towards greater input accessibility, but, "for gamers like me who can't use the DualSense, the Edge is unfortunately useless," says gaming accessibility consultant Vivek Gohil.

This is an issue that could be alleviated if PlayStation offered fully accessible control alternatives. But two years after the launch of the PS5, Sony has yet to offer its own accessible control product or allow mainstream third-party accessibility hardware to be integrated into the PlayStation 5.

Tools like the Cronus Max and Titan 2, which allowed consoles to pair with other controllers and allowed button remaps, offered workarounds for a time (although the extra cost was far to be ideal for a group of regular gamers with tight budgets). But in 2021, PlayStation fixed the flaws that allowed them to work, likely due to the tools' association with cheating in FPS games.

Input accessibility (and hardware accessibility, in general) doesn't seem to be a priority for Sony. "I've played on Sony consoles since the first PlayStation," says Krissie. "To be kicked out of a console because of my disability is a bit of a kick in the teeth, and to be honest, totally unacceptable I...