Founded by Dr Mick Donegan in 2007, SpecialEffect was born from a noticeable gap in support for disabled young people in accessing games as well as a lack of perceived empathy for the importance games play in young life. “In my former job, I was working to help young people of education age to be able to access school work. While we (had found all) sorts of ways in which people could use a range of technology to achieve access to education and communication, the parents were saying to me, ‘Well, that’s great but my child can’t play with their friends’,” Donegan explains. “As an educationalist, I knew that play was really important.”
“In the early 2000s more and more people were playing video games, and it became obvious that was something that those young people were missing out on,” he continues. “There was no specialist organisation in the UK that I could refer them on to.”
When Donegan formed SpecialEffect in 2007, the charity’s focus was on creating bespoke accessibility hardware setups, often through hacking existing hardware to fit new use cases. This often involved visiting disabled gamers in their homes with an occupational therapist, before hacking hardware to allow for new input devices to be wired in. All of this work was done without charge, including necessary return visits if a player’s access needs changed – in the process ensuring that no financial burden was placed on the families of disabled gamers to access the tools they needed.
The charity also dedicated time to attending gaming conventions, so it could showcase technology to the public. This outreach undoubtedly acted as an early catalyst for changing attitudes toward gaming accessibility here in the UK: booths demonstrating technology such as gaze tracking was applied in a way that made those advancements feel exciting for everyone.
“You see people trying out something like eye-controlled games and you just see it in their faces – they just start to get it”, adds SpecialEffect Communications Officer, Mark Saville. “When they finish the demonstration there’s this moment of: ‘yes, I can see what this means to somebody now’.”
While much of SpecialEffect’s work hasn’t changed since its founding, one area they have expanded into is direct outreach work with developers and publishers. Both the Xbox Adaptive Controller and PlayStation Access Controller were developed in consultation with SpecialEffect, and the mass production of those modular controller bases has done a huge amount to lower the barrier of entry of the cost of accessible gaming hardware and setups. While some gamers still require bespoke hardware, for many others these controllers have brought accessible hardware to a price point that can be accessed without that financial support.
While video game accessibility is currently experiencing a huge surge of positive momentum industry wide, with dedicated job roles at game studios being created in recent years to push accessibility further forward, it’s important to remember how different things were when SpecialEffect formed. While dedicated organisations were out there trying to advocate for accessibility support, video game accessibility was still well over a decade from becoming a topic of mainstream conversation.
In the current moment, games focusing on software-based accessibility are receiving specific award nominations for that work, and major gaming sites are including coverage of accessibility features in game reviews. However, in the background, SpecialEffect continues doing pivotal work to make sure that financial, educational, and physical barriers don’t prevent disabled gamers from having the best chance possible of playing the kinds of video games we all love.
