Players with visual or motor impairments devise their own ways to keep playing, while Microsoft, Sony and ONCE create adapted controllers and versions of video and board games.
When it's time to draw a card, Cristian M. Amores cannot see a thing: he points his iPhone camera at a QR code stuck to the sleeve and waits for VoiceOver to tell him what he has just drawn. He is blind and since late 2020 he has been adapting, card by card, the way he plays 'Magic: The Gathering', the collectible card game created by mathematician and PhD Richard Garfield in 1993.
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Amores shares the whole process under the name Magic Accesible on social network X, and his case is far from unique: from controllers reprogrammed button by button to board games with tactile pieces, accessibility is gaining ground in the industry, although it is still a long way from being built into design by default: from big-budget video games to the after-dinner card session.
The Magic deck you read with your phone camera
His first attempt was braille. Using a Dymo-style label maker he marked each card with a raised number so he could tell them apart and look up their details in a separate database. It did not work, for several reasons: braille adds bulk and makes the paper thicker, the deck became too chunky to shuffle smoothly and, in an official tournament, a marked card can be treated as a signal for what you do or do not want to draw, which automatically puts you out of the competition.
That QR code was his solution for a while, but it is not what he uses now: having to line up the camera without being sure the card had scanned properly slowed him down more than playing without help, so he dropped it too. He now uses NFC tags, which he only has to bring close to the phone for the screen reader to read out the entire card, no aiming or waiting. "Since then I've taken a huge leap as a player", he sums up.
All he has to do is type in a card's number and the rest of the columns are filled in automatically. He scans the QR codes with the iPhone's built-in code scanner and follows the game with VoiceOver, the screen reader integrated into Apple devices.
The project still relies on outside help, someone who can read a new card out loud before he adds it to the database, a print shop to produce the QR codes small enough, but it has already allowed him to play in shops and at the Modern National Championship (another MTG format) held in Soria in December 2024, where he had his own stand explaining the system. In November 2022, "El Mundo" ran a feature on his story, and since then he has hosted a podcast with the same name as his social media account, Magic Accesible, in which he interviews other players and developers in the sector.
Amores has not yet entered tournaments with strict rules, only more informal games. In Soria, several judges came over to see how the system worked; one told him there would probably be no issue with using it in competition.
In another match, a different judge did check the rulebook and confirmed that tournaments ban electronic devices during play except where strictly necessary, an exception Amores believes could apply to him: until he passes a card over his phone, he does not know what he has just drawn, and every card in his deck is marked in the same way. If he ever competes, he says, he will inform the organisers in advance, both because of the adaptations and because he tends to need more time per round than other players.
Asked what single thing he would ask of Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes "Magic: The Gathering", he does not hesitate: an accessible version of Magic Arena, the game's official PC client, which would instantly reach blind players anywhere in the world. There is already a community-made 'mod' that does the job, although, like any unofficial fix, it depends on the company not blocking it or breaking it with an update.
"WotC, let the 'mod' carry on existing", he says bluntly, although he clarifies that he has not yet tried it himself. On physical cards he is more sceptical: he imagines cards with a factory-printed QR code that linked to Gatherer, the company's official database, but doubts it would be worth Wizards' while at that scale. "Paper can take anything you throw at it, but reality cannot", he sums up.
From braille to NFC: the Commander deck a group of friends adapted from scratch
Amores is not the only one to have arrived at NFC tags by the same route. On Reddit, under the username jerichodarkstar, a group of friends explained how they adapted one of their group's Commander decks (a format within MtG) for a player with a degenerative visual impairment from birth.
He started playing Commander in 2023, but by then he could only tell lands from non-lands by their shape; for everything else he needed someone sitting nearby to read out every card he drew. The issue was not just dependency: because everyone at the table could hear what he had in his hand, he was playing under what the group describe as a constant 'telepathy effect' that nobody else had to deal with.
At Christmas 2025, tired of the disadvantage, they decided to change things. Their first attempt was braille: they embossed, on each card sleeve but never on the card itself, the name, the mana cost, the type, and the power and toughness of creatures, placing each piece of information roughly where it appears on the original.
The card effects were the real problem: the full rules text of a card will not fit on a single sleeve, so they came up with their own system of abbreviations combined with the contractions already used in braille; "if you read it literally, it would sound like it was written by a caveman", admits jerichodarkstar.
It took them three to four days to 'braille' the whole deck, but the system did not survive regular play: after two months of games the raised dots were already wearing down, each 'brailled' sleeve was two to four times thicker than normal, shuffling became a nightmare and the deck would not even stand in a single pile because of how uneven it was.
They found the alternative almost by accident. They posted an update on Reddit describing the problem, but the post disappeared. The clue came from a comment on the original thread: a user, whose mention they were explicitly allowed to include, told them that the games shop where he used to play had a blind regular who used NFC tags.
The group started researching and, within a few days, had ordered the tags and set up a new system: an NFC tag inside each sleeve, linked via the Shortcuts app on the iPhone to a separate note containing all the information for that card. When he brings the phone close, the screen reader reads the whole thing through an earpiece, with no need to abbreviate anything or get the camera angle right.
The leap was drastic: what used to take three or four days with braille can now be done in around three hours per deck. They have been playing this way for almost a year, with four complete 100-card decks and two more under construction.
Gloria and Iria: advising publishers from inside and outside disability
In Spain, much of this work is also being done by people outside the big organisations. Proyecto Glirp (source in Spanish) is run by Gloria and Iria and began in 2014 with a blog focused on visual impairment, versinlimitesaccesibilidad. Iria has a visual disability; Gloria handles the technical and audiovisual side of the project.
Over the years, board games have gradually taken over from the rest of the content they covered, technology, books, travel, until they became their speciality: they advise publishers, give talks and run workshops on cultural accessibility in areas such as tourism and education, and this year they have published their own book, "Jugar sin límites", focused on accessibility in games.
In that book they go over the most common design flaws in tabletop games, and, they say, they are almost always the same: poor contrast between letters or icons and the background, and font sizes that, whether for aesthetic reasons or lack of space, are usually too small.
For Gloria and Iria this is not just a sight issue: "The less effort you have to make to work out what an element says, the faster you will understand it", they explain, so it is also a question of how long it takes any player to grasp what they have in front of them.
Asked whether any publisher stands out for getting this right, they are cautious: they do not see any that have turned these improvements into a constant, although they do acknowledge that those releasing children's games tend to pay more attention to these details.
They say the barrier that most often goes unnoticed by people without visual impairment is not on the board but at the table. Visual disability covers many degrees, from total blindness to significant residual vision, and each player has their own needs; what almost never happens is someone asking what support they need.
"Very often the lack of accessibility in a game can be offset with words or descriptions", they point out, without touching a single physical component. A player may not have access to what is on the board, which cards are available or how other players are progressing, and it is enough for the rest of the table to describe their actions out loud to solve it. They acknowledge, though, that there are games whose mechanics make even this solution impossible.
When a publisher contacts them, accessibility has rarely been built in from the start. Gloria and Iria describe a sector that is moving forward but without any consistent thread: "There are games where more effort goes into making them inclusive and then the next one released can be totally the opposite".
They do work with some publishers and authors who consult them during the design process itself, but the more usual pattern is the opposite: they play a title that has already been released and, in their review, point out what could be improved and with what options.
The point at which they are brought in does change the outcome. It is not the same to design something inclusive from the outset as it is to add or tweak components later. "If you are starting to design something and you already have the guidelines or recommendations to improve its accessibility, you save yourself having to redo the work later to fix certain aspects".
Controllers redesigned piece by piece
Microsoft launched it on 4 September 2018 at 87 euros, developed with organisations such as AbleGamers, SpecialEffect, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation and Craig Hospital. Instead of a hand-shaped controller, it is a flat panel with two large buttons, a D-pad and 19 3.5 mm ports plus two USB ports to plug in the switches, joysticks or mounts that many players with reduced mobility already had, and then remap them through an app.
You can play with your hand, foot, chin or mouth; even the packaging was designed to be opened with one finger or with your teeth. In 2025, as part of the Ability Summit, Microsoft added the Xbox Adaptive Joystick, a one-handed controller costing 26 euros that works on its own or as a companion to the Adaptive Controller.
Sony unveiled its answer at CES 2023 under the name Project Leonardo and launched it as the Access Controller on 6 December that year, at 87 euros. It is round and can be used resting on a table or mounted on a support, and packs eight buttons and a central joystick, all of them interchangeable for pieces of different shapes and sizes depending on each player's strength or range of movement.
It lets you create up to 30 profiles and sync two Access Controllers with one another, or one with a standard DualSense, so inputs from more than one device can be combined. Its weak point, raised since launch, is that it does not replicate the touchpad or motion sensors of the DualSense, something that becomes a handicap in games that rely on them.
Accessibility in video games is no longer a niche
The numbers explain why the big manufacturers keep investing in this area. According to the Entertainment Software Association's 2025 annual survey (source in Spanish), 21% of adult players in the United States report having some kind of disability, and almost half say accessibility options are very important when choosing a game.
The World Health Organization (source in Spanish) estimates that more than 1 billion people worldwide, more than one in six, have some form of disability (source in Spanish), and in 2025 Microsoft cited a figure of 429 million players with disabilities worldwide when presenting its own Xbox tools.
That same year, the ESA, together with Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Ubisoft and other companies, launched the Accessible Games Initiative (source in Spanish), a shared and voluntary labelling system so that a game's store page can indicate, at a glance, whether it includes adjustable text, large subtitles, narrated menus or remappable controls.
Some titles are already cited as benchmarks: "The Last of Us Part II" added audio description to all its cinematics and an option that turns spoken dialogue into vibrations in the DualSense controller, so that a deaf or hard-of-hearing player can feel the rhythm and emphasis of a sentence as well as reading it in the subtitles. In Spain, Fundación ONCE runs a parallel project focused on video games, Ga11y (source in Spanish), which catalogues accessible titles according to the type of disability they address.
When the problem is telling the pieces apart by touch
Beyond home-made solutions, manufacturers and organisations have been releasing accessible board games straight from the factory for years. In the United States, Mattel developed UNO Braille with the National Federation of the Blind (source in Spanish), with braille markings on every card and a rulebook available in downloadable braille or audio.
In Spain, ONCE, through its Bibliographic Service and foundation, has adapted, among others, the puzzle "Katamino" with braille pieces and board, the game "Apalabrados" in collaboration with Etermax, a domino set with raised tiles, an adapted "Scrabble" and a braille edition of the card game "Virus!", not counting the classics that are now common: chess and parchís with raised boards, or Spanish-suited and poker decks labelled in braille.
The same challenge runs through all these adaptations: making pieces distinguishable by touch, giving boards depth and transferring the text on the cards, the hardest part, because it is purely visual, into braille, embossing or, increasingly often, a QR code with spoken description so that nobody has to sit out and miss the game.
