There are 3B gamers in the world, and many of those players have disabilities. Often called “accessibility” or “adaptive gaming”, this is one of the most important topics (and markets) in the gaming industry. From mobility, visual, and hearing impairments to cognitive and speech impairments, the industry has begun making strides in addressing how we can enable as many people as possible to access gaming experiences, plus interpret and perceive the content as intended.

Alexander Dunn, Founder and CEO of Cephable, joins our host, Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, for a discussion on who is doing what in the hardware space, which games are masterclasses in pushing the frontiers of accessibility, and how AI is impacting studios' abilities to do these things in a cost efficient manner. We also discuss how Cephable is playing a role as a mediator between different types of inputs (gesture control, voice activation, and facial recognition) and is building a marketplace of games that support adaptive controls.

We’d also like to thank Lightspeed Venture Partners for making this episode possible! With its dedicated gaming practice, "Lightspeed Gaming," the firm is investing from over $7B in early- and growth-stage capital — the by far largest fund focused on gaming and interactive technology. If you’re interested in learning more, go to https://gaming.lsvp.com/.

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Alexandra: What's up everyone. And welcome to the Naavik gaming podcast. I'm your host, Alex Takei, and this, of course, is Interview and Insights. So last episode, we talked a ton about voices and input, covering a big series C for a company called Volley that's building voice video games.

And we talked about inputs like motion sensors and specific hardware for games that extend beyond the controller. However, we talked mostly about making those experiences fun versus enabling people to have them in the first place. And today, that's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about adaptability in gaming, or as some call it, accessibility in gaming.

There are 3 billion gamers in the world, but limited research into the experiences of disabled gamers. And according to even NPR of those 3 billion, around 46 million gamers have disabilities currently. So today we're going to spend some time on shackling stereotypes around what a disability for a gamer actually is how folks are working towards cultivating an industry where everyone can play and enjoy the entertainment experience.

Some of the business forces that are cajoling industry players to step left or step right. And what more needs to be done? IE, how can we get people to think about and design for this group of players? And so I have on air with me another Alex or Alexander rather. I'm honored to welcome Alexander Dunn, founder and CEO of Cephable.

Cephable is a platform that is enabling control over technology through facial recognition, gesture control, voice activation, and adaptive interfaces. Of course he'll take a deeper dive, but I'm super to have you on air today. Welcome to the show, Alex.

Alexander: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Alexandra: Awesome. So before we actually dive into the meat of the content today I'd love for you to tell the audience a little bit about yourself and a quick summary of Cephable.

And also on top of that, I'd love you to close your intro with telling us about a game that you admire actually for its game, for its advances in accessibility.

Alexander: Yeah. So thanks so much for having me. I'm Alex Dunn and I'm really coming from a background mostly in engineering and applying machine learning over the last sort of eight to ten years, and really got started on the research that led to what Cephable is in order to support a younger brother of mine with a disability, basically, right at the start of the pandemic, went home to visit my family watched my brother have a hard time keeping up with some of his friends in Minecraft. And for him, his disability impacts sort of the dexterity in his hands and fine motor control in some ways. So using things like a keyboard and a mouse or a gamepad or, these sort of physical inputs can be challenging.

Not impossible, but, it's things that he has to do at his own pace. And so through the pandemic, I had a whole lot of extra time working on ways to apply speech recognition in new ways that might work best for him. And then that started to slowly turn into more and more people trying these early prototypes created a version of camera controls that actually use Snapchat and probably the hackiest thing I've ever created.

And ultimately won a few hackathons to bootstrap. What was originally called enabled play, which is these physical boxes for plugging into your console or into your PC to use voice and bass and head controls. And now is all software based and really empowering people to do all sorts of things across their sort of digital landscape.

Now in terms of games where accessibility has been at the forefront I'm really a big fan of things like Forza which have not just added accessibility in the form of different color settings, different input modes. But I think it's done a really good job at leveling the playing field with some levels of automation, things like keeping you on the track and stuff like that without compromising things like the competitive side of the game, which is something that we hear all the time.

It's is there going to be some trade off of making something more accessible with hurting the competitive gaming aspect of the game? And I think Forrest has done a really great job at basically bolstering both sides of that.

Alexandra: Wow, that's fantastic. Very inspirational background.

I think a lot of founders are inspired by, personal life experience or something that, has happened in their in their family, their life. What you're doing in the space is tremendous. And I really appreciate the forest example because it's a great place to kick off into our topic because you just mentioned some things that maybe stand out to some people as surprising.

Like you said, colorblind mode or assistance and staying on the track. That's not necessarily always what we think of when we think of supporting players with disabilities. And so I think that, this is a great way to kick off our episode today, which is what disabilities do games need to be serving better.

And you know what it means to be a disabled gamer and what it means in this space to have a disability. Because I think we. potentially might have a very narrow definition of what that looks like. So I'd love for you to run through potentially like a list of, what of disabilities in the sense that we are designing potentially adaptive hardware for it or intuitive design for it.

Like you said, a colorblind mode or assistance with staying on the track to you, can you help me break down like what those categories are for gamers?

Alexander: Yeah. Would it be inappropriate to say like all of them?

Alexandra: No, I don't think so.

Alexander: So the way that I look at it is there's impairments that impact how you as a, as an individual player receive information from the game, like that's audio, that's visual, that's conceptual, that's learning curves, things like that, and then there's impairments that might impact how you input back into the game, things that might impact how you use a controller, how you actually send your inputs to the input system to actually take actions on the game.

And so the way to categorize those is at a sort of impairment level in the disability space is for folks that have vision impairments, whether that's blindness, colorblindness, and that's a very much a spectrum in the world of the blind community and how can we basically support interacting and understanding what's conceptually happening on screen or in the game without having to really rely on all facets of the screen.

And there's some really interesting approaches to dynamic audio descriptions to changing different colors and sizing and things like that, that can really help a lot of people that aren't really experienced in supporting folks with disabilities always just assume a blind person can't play my game because they can't see what's going on.

And it's a visual experience. However. that spectrum is very broad and so blindness can impact like just a certain spot, whether that be more of a tunnel vision and loss of peripheral vision or the opposite, it might be impacted blurriness at certain sizes or seeing certain things, not just like this sort of misconception of a person just sees all black or all white and they therefore can't experience it.

And so for folks, especially in the sort of mid range of that spectrum of vision, being able to have an alternative way to just change settings, even to impact like UI size is one of the most common things that we hear from folks when it comes to the side of folks that have hearing impairments, deaf and hard of hearing.

It's ensuring that you have some other way to express what's going on in an audio fashion. My favorite example is Fortnite that added the visual effects to when you hear gunshots or cars in directional audio. They'll show like a ring and sort of a visual signal as to how loud that noise is near you.

So you know if someone is like shooting a gun right next to you, even if you can't see them. Because you're getting that audio feedback. And then when it comes to the input side, this is really where I, spend most of my time and my focus and what we do at Cephable. But it's it's, there's a lot of really easy wins to get started.

And there's this spectrum of, is it possible for someone to play my game? And then there's the level of is it an equitable experience that I can create for someone that just needs a different type of input? And so when it comes to things like, is it possible, one of the most Common easy wins is just allowing someone to remap their controls.

And it's something that if you think about it upfront and you execute it upfront, super easy to then maintain through the game development life cycle. But if you're then trying to patch it in last second, it can be challenging. And so it's one of those considerations that should be looked at first and foremost.

And then there's the alternative inputs, right? It's like, how can I best support someone who's using an Xbox adaptive controller or a PlayStation access controller, or voice inputs from Sable or, voice attack or things like that, or camera based inputs and making sure that a player can easily adapt those controls in order to still play the game in the same way.

Alexandra: Yeah, those are, first of all, thank you for the terrific overview. It sounds like, we've split these two things into two categories, the way that I see and experience the game and then the way that I interact with it on the input side. And you also jumped forward totally, which was towards like, what does building accessibility mean across assistive tech, adjustable difficulty levels, haptics feedback, like you mentioned, or UI UX stuff or visual effects.

But backtracking in there in general, there's these two kind of tranches, right? And I actually think that it's interesting because we call this potentially adaptive gaming. But, even for someone like myself who I guess I wouldn't consider myself to be having a disability on the most extreme side.

I've had some very difficult times reading the inventory screen in Witcher. I think I know a lot of people that have had a lot of difficulties reading the inventory stuff and the text scrolling and Baldur's Gate III, for example. And so I think that it's it's important to mention that you're obviously serving this group of community who may have an actual visual impairment, but it's also a lot of this accessibility stuff is just for your everyday gamer as well.

So I just wanted to call that out there. But yeah. But, I have a question here and this might be just a perspective thing which opened this episode by talking about that there's 3 billion gamers and there's, limited research into, potentially the experiences of disabled gamers.

And we talked about these two sides, input, inputting into the game, and then also being able to experience and perceive it in the appropriate manner. Is there a Bigger problem to tackle, like which one is the bigger problem? Because I think obviously every studio has limited resources. And so yeah, if you had to say which is the one that is the most malignant or the most behind, what in your opinion is the appropriate problem to tackle first?

Alexander: Yeah. I guess perspective wise not to state this as a matter of fact, we see mostly folks that need adaptive inputs being where there's the biggest gaps. And for a couple reasons like. One, if you do have the means to support adaptive controls, whether it's switch based inputs, Xbox Adaptive Control, or things like that, it still means that the player has to pay a lot more money in order to play your game, right?

And so we refer to that as a disability tax, versus is there a way to support alternative inputs directly in the game up front? Without basically asking a player to go buy an extra 100 controller, which then requires on average about 800 worth of switches and custom joysticks in order to use that's where I think there's a bigger impact.

And also just looking at like the macroeconomic side of it in the disability space folks with mobility impairments are the largest category of people in general. Again, there isn't a ton of studies done in gaming specifically to say are gamers with disabilities following those same trends that the World Health Organization put out last year.

Generally speaking, we tend to see it as truth that they, that gaming tends to follow the same sort of categories, the same percentages in terms of like folks with disabilities against the general population, gamers with disabilities against the larger gaming population. But there's still, the jury's out on, on what those numbers are.

For example, you mentioned, I think it was like 46 million gamers with disabilities. Microsoft put out a number that was like 300 or 400 million. And that's looking at the 1. 3 billion people globally with a disability. And then taking the average of 20 to 26 percent of folks having some sort of an impairment or disability according to the World Health Organization, which not to get like too nerdy and sciencey about it, but essentially like to say that it's a disability according to those numbers is to have an impairment that affects a an ability to do a major life activity independently.

So that could be I can't feed myself. I can't move independently. I can't. Without some sort of assistive technology or aid, basically do these typical activities of daily living. And so when we see the gaming space specifically, there's also some skewed things around are folks with disabilities really gaming if it is not accessible to them?

And that's one of the misconceptions that we hear too. But especially for folks with motor impairments, we hear that all the time. If an individual can't use a controller, can't use a keyboard or mouse, are they really playing my game? And the answer is they probably try to, and then don't continue to play your game.

Is what we hear from, especially, our user feedback and consortium, right?

Alexandra: Yeah. I think that honestly echoes a little bit of what might be my gut instinct, right? Because I think what I want to talk about next is you gave a couple examples of different types of impairments from the perception side, the input side, and I want to walk through a couple examples of games that are actually like good shining beacons to understand like, what can you actually be doing?

And I think that there's actually a plethora of games that have done a lot of the perception based impairment assistance. And so I guess we'll talk about some of those things. We know that God of War, for example, and Last of Us 2 are shining beacons of what to do in accessibility.

Based on some of the way that they did their input control, sorry their control mapping, colorblind modes, text sizes, et cetera. And so I want to talk a little bit about, like mapping some of the solutions that you can do. To create accessibility to the disability itself. So maybe if it could be possible, let's talk a little bit about those that help perception, right?

So those that have cognitive impairments, hearing impairments, or visual impairments what are games that have done and solve this problem really well in a, in a way that you admire.

Alexander: Yeah. You've named a few of them. One of the ones that I think more recently that surprised people was actually Call of Duty.

Specific, specifically in the single player campaign first, but basically giving folks the ability to see outlines, bright colors of friendlies versus enemies. When otherwise, if you haven't played a call of duty campaign, a lot of it's very dark and you can't really perceive what's going on and it's intentional by design to be thematic to what a real combat experience should be like, but I think they, they did a really great job with that implementation to support.

I can't see someone who is, a hundred yards away from me in the dark, even because of a disability will give me some alternative to be able to do it and doing it first in a way for their audience, where it's in the single player campaign, it's not impacting the competitive side of things where everyone's going to turn it on.

And now it's an expectation that everybody's playing with some change color mode but they've also done a really great job, including in competitive with different forms of color blindness, UI sizing, things like that. I think there's been, you named a few more that have done a really great job with showcasing not just like different forms of color paletting based on color blindness, but being able to basically raise certain colors in certain events to give a visual indication that something important is happening.

And there's, for example, God of War is one of my favorite examples, because they do it in a way where it feels part of the thematic experience that you have. It's a game that obviously is action packed, but it is so much storytelling and experience and they did such a great job leaning into the perception side while feeling like that almost enhanced the sort of cinematic experience that you had too.

Those are some of my go to single player RPG side and then what wouldn't necessarily expect to like competitive first person shooters and some really cool changes there. One last shout out is to Overwatch 2. They added all sorts of different modes for color indications, UI sizing, things like that.

And those are the types of interactions that you can make more accessible with relatively easy wins, right? We talk about adding inputs to games for folks that need an alternative or augmentative input. Yeah, adding speech recognition that's adaptive to your game is typically something that's challenging.

Versus making it so you can resize the UI is such a big win with relatively low effort compared to alternate. So shout out to the games that are doing that for sure.

Alexandra: Yeah. Thank you for sharing those examples. And before we go into the, the more like hardware side maybe some rhythm based games could be like a good example, but how is in your perception AI impact impacting the ability to build these tools?

For example in my research, I think one of the big solutions is also adaptive difficulty. Honestly, maybe Elden Ring is not that accessible to anybody. But, and a lot of From Soul's games are not accessible, right? But and again, I think this goes to your point of, what's the balance between making it adjustable such that it kind of, changes or manipulates the way that the genre is perceived.

Like it is supposed to be hardcore hack and slash. Like you are supposed to, it is supposed to be unforgiving. That is the point of. The fun that the designers have intended. And then there's this kind of like adaptive difficulty part, which kind of, would put it, put you, put a tricycle wheels on the side of your bike.

But is AI really impacting any of the studio's ability to do any of these things faster? Easier with less resources. And if so, how?

Alexander: I definitely think so. And I guess there's two sort of sides to how they are supporting. There's like the literal M. P. C. A. I. Enhancements that have been happening, which have been built around, updates in machine learning and on device hardware capabilities at the silicon level.

And then there's also like the literal generative A. I. Side. When it comes to things like adaptive difficulty, I really like your point. There's a, the put on the tricycles and then there's also ones that really do a well by design. And I actually think I'm a, from softy myself, I When I first started my research, I said, this is back when Dark Souls 3 was new, I was like, if I can make Dark Souls 3 accessible to play with just your face and your voice, then I can make any game more accessible, and did some of that, which was cool, but from a perspective of integrating enhanced experiences that can be accessible, like difficulty settings Elden Ring was, I think, the first time that FromSoftware actually did anything like that, but they did it in a way where it was built into the design of the game.

You could play like I do and bash your head against the wall over and over again, playing at a much lower level, not using any summons, things like that, but they give you an alternative path you can take. And then I also think that there's been enhancements in how we can change the interactions that NPCs are having with typical pathing in AI in character development by just using More generative AI and modern machine learning practices that can run on device in order to basically make interactions easy.

And I think games that add difficulty settings in single player have started to get a lot better where it's no longer the easy mode is people just NPCs running into walls. Which we've seen in, especially in early development stages in indie studios, like because figuring out AI is hard. But I also think the use of generative AI in order to enhance the player experience and make it more accessible in general has been really cool.

Making it easier to actually, first of all, write the code itself with things like GitHub Copilot when you're actually tapping C code in Unreal or C Sharp in Unity to actually make it easier to implement things because people have done this stuff before. From even things like we talked about, like UI resizing and, color re paletting.

But I also look at AI impacting accessibility from the player perspective. And it's what we do at Suffable, right? We're a machine, a heavy machine learning application. We do things like speech recognition and inferencing. We're even doing some really cool stuff now that we're exploring, like being able to contextually understand what's happening on your screen in the game in order to help a player Basically chip away at some of the input sequences and help them get there without doing it for them.

But I do think there's also some pretty interesting advancements in, in how even games like Forza keep you on the track. They're not doing that with just like basic pathing. It's contextually doing it where it's a smooth drive. And then they're using neural nets behind the scenes in order to actually keep your pathing the same way that they would use an MPC for dynamic pathing.

So things like that, I think have been really interesting. It's Advancements in machine learning and AI, I think, touch all aspects of game and application development and ultimately the player experience.

Alexandra: Yeah. And actually this is maybe a tangential, but I'd love to get your take on this because I just thought of something.

I think we've probably all seen that video of the Tik TOK girl playing video games with her mind. She plays like Ellen ring with her mind using EEG, which is just the electrical activity of the brain. I think her name is like a Perry. Cautionary act. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. What do you think about that as a creating a for a creation of a form of accessibility?

I guess I've more perceived it as I don't know if this actually works. Maybe this is like some magic situation Yeah, we think that's actually like a strong solution into building accessibility.

Alexander: Yes, and no, so You know, for example, what Paragraph is using, I believe it's an OpenBCI headset.

I could be wrong, so don't take that as fact, but it's either way, it's BCI Brain Computer Interface devices. They've existed for a while as a category, being able to perceive EEG signals from your head and then do something with it. I'd say in terms of like real world scenario, we're still at least five to 10 years off from seeing that be like reliable as a primary input.

If you've never used a BCI the process is basically that you want for a noninvasive BCI, like neural link being like you need surgery to implant this thing. There's a few others that are in that space too, but let's say noninvasive. You put on a headset. First of all, it's not as easy as just putting on the headset.

Usually you need some sort of solution to actually be able to read the EEG signals. Usually that's like a saline solution and you have to constantly reapply it. So the actual nodes that go on your head, now your hair's all wet and salty too. Anyway that's besides the point. But the actual understanding of the signals right now is typically limited, like at the most, 10 different signals it can perceive.

And so the process too, of saying okay, I've got this headset. I dunked it in saline. I put it on my head. How can I make sure that when I think this thought, it's the A button, or it's the right trigger, or things like that? That process takes a long time and it's very unreliable over time. So the more you use it, the softer your signals get, things like that.

There are advancements happening in that space to make it easier to read through the noise. And it's actually where on device machine learning is advancing a lot. But the way that like, We look at BCI from the Cephable perspective is like we want to be able to receive BCI inputs and then help player adapt that to the game that they're doing without having to go through this sort of constant retraining process because it's definitely a pain, but there's some really cool things happening.

It's just, it's not a like, here's a headset go solution. And they're also really expensive, right? So we're not talking about an Xbox adaptive controller to have over here for a hundred bucks. And then 800 worth of switches and joysticks. We're talking like thousands and thousands of dollars for even like the mid level headsets.

It's very cool tech. I think it's got a long ways to go though, before it becomes really consumer grade.

Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah. I just think that it's just, it sounds like, first of all, some games are just so complicated, right? Like it's I don't, sometimes I don't even know what I'm doing, to be honest, if I'm playing devil may cry, like I'm just, it's I'm not like, Oh yes, X, X pause square triangle that clearly in my mind.

So I actually think it would be almost more difficult to use my mind to play a game like that than it would be to use a controller where it's almost like second nature. I guess it is happening in my brain. I just don't even know it, but my consciousness doesn't know it. So I don't know.

It's interesting. So I thank you for clarifying, what you think of the EEG space. And I think also the cost component is really relevant, right? It's not really a plausible solution, just given how priced out everybody would be. You just actually just tapped in it for those that are watching on YouTube, right?

Alex has got a bunch of different adaptive controllers behind him. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to be building accessibility with assistive actual hardware technology and, like, how some of these controllers works? And then after this, we're probably going to talk a little bit about, actually what Sony, what Microsoft, what ZephyrBull is doing, but from the general level is this something that a gamer buys an adaptive set of hardware, they set it up themselves, and is there compatibility in the same way that, how Steam has control, supports controllers?

Does the game have to basically support an adaptive heart set of hardware?

Alexander: So for those watching the video set, I'll pull it up, but I've got an X Box adaptive controller in front of me. It's a white rectangle, two giant black buttons on it, D pad, X Box button. And then there's a whole bunch of basically mono jacks on the back with icons for each of the actual typical X Box buttons.

And so the way that, that a lot of these physical, I'll say switch based hardware, and I can talk about the other categories of hardware inputs is they take switches which is a literal button, just like a key on a keyboard that usually the sort of standard is taking like a mono audio jack and essentially when button is closed, signal goes through.

When button is open, signal stops and you can get a whole bunch of them and have a whole bunch of spaghetti cables floating around in order to use. Logitech ships a kit for the Xbox adaptive controller and the PlayStation access control. It's the same switches, but just with different stickers for the different buttons.

And what's cool about these is that they just act as the regular controller would. So like an Xbox adaptive controller, you can connect over Bluetooth to your Xbox or to your PC. And it says, I'm an Xbox controller. And it's just a different form of creating the inputs. And the same is true for the Sony controller as well.

It's going to say, it's going to act basically like a dual shock. But the in terms of typically how people procure them. You buy them, right? And you hope that there's inventory for them, first of all, because there's not a whole lot of them that are made. But what's also a challenge with it, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, is the controllers themselves, like the Xbox Adaptive Controllers at a relatively affordable price point compared to other assistive technology.

I think it's like a hundred dollars or something like that. Yeah. But you can't just buy this and use it. Like you do also need to buy switches. And that's where the market of like assistive tech kind of gets outrageous. So people like Logitech that aren't an assistive technology company, building switches is great.

But usually someone who needs an Xbox adaptive controller also needs to be able to use a joystick with it and can't use a standard Xbox joystick. They need a custom joystick. Those start to get really expensive. Or if you need a switch that isn't a button there's like a touch sensor switches.

There's really large, they call it big red button switches. Each of those is like a hundred dollars. So if you're thinking about what's on an Xbox, pull up an Xbox One controller for those watching the video too for every single one of these buttons, you're paying on average between 10 to 150.

So in order to play games on your PC or on your Xbox using an Xbox Adaptive Controller, or same thing with the PlayStation Access Controller, you need to spend that type of money. And that's where it gets, really expensive, and it's why organizations like AbleGamers Charity, SpecialEffect, Oh gosh, I'm blanking on a whole bunch of other ones.

The Cerebral Palsy Foundation jeez, there's so many. But basically they'll go through the process of getting grants to procure devices and switches and setups, and then they go work with individuals to personalize those setups. And those are the organizations we work with as well to help folks use Stuffable.

But the, that's the space, right? And so that's with the cheapest option. Xbox really disrupted the assistive tech market for gaming and opened up space. Generally gaming experience for a lot of people by doing this, even at that expensive price point, because typically the way that assistive technology hardware is procured is through insurance or through Medicare.

And because of that, there's this whole CMS coding practice where you get put in a device category and then you get a minimum price that you can set. So even if you want it to sell something that could get covered by insurance and then have someone buy it, minimum price is usually around a few thousand dollars.

And so there's this interesting space of there's either makers who are just out there making stuff and trying to ship them. For example, the quad stick, which I could talk a little bit more about in the hardware space. And then there's medical grade ones that you either talk to your doctor, wait six months, then they have to go to insurance or Medicaid or Medicare, wait another six months, most people get rejected in terms of getting access to it in the first place.

But then if you do, it's been a year since you literally said, Hey doc, I think I need a different input device to be able to, do things on my computer, so it's a pretty, it's a pretty wild space from the economic standpoint and like how users actually acquire these I mentioned quad stick for those who don't know what quad stick is.

There's a few different ones, but the primary one is a quad stick. I think it's called the FPS. It's basically a small microcontroller that has the way I would describe it as some straws that stick out of it. And then they have sip and puff sensors within those straws, and then itself is mounted as a joystick.

And typically someone would have a mounting arm either to their chair or to their desk that then has a quad stick on it and it's sitting in front of their face, and then they can sip and puff into switches, and then move the quad stick around as a joystick. So you get buttons for different pressure points within those sip and puff sensors.

So it means someone typically with quadriplegia is able to use just their mounts as a means to control. And there's some competitive gamers out there that are pretty, pretty nasty in like the competitive FPS space that just use quad sticks or these quad sticks and voice controls yourself or something like that, but it's that's another interesting device where I think they price it like 500 and you also have to buy a mount and then you also have to wait because it's being built by a guy.

Just a single guy who's just trying to build as many as he can. And there are people who have built macros to purchase them on Sunday night because he opens up like three every Monday that he can actually sell and ship. Wow. Like that's the, that's like the dynamics of the space. It's either you get like medical grade stuff, Get an Xbox adaptive controller, and then you still need to get like medical grade or expensive consumer switches, or you go a quad stick or something like that.

It's pretty wild.

Alexandra: Yeah, I guess I just never really appreciated like the, it's almost to me, it's I'm building my own rig, right? It's Oh, it's just not that I bought this thing. CPU, but I got to buy my RAM and I've got to buy the fish tank and I've got to buy like all this other stuff.

And if I want an optical drive, I got to buy that, right? It's it's not just the one thing. I guess I was always under the presumption that I would just buy an adaptive controller, right? And that would be set and ready to go. But it sounds like it's a lot more complicated than that. And we're going to get to to the business and economics of this space, but we've clearly touched upon like kind of all of these peripheral components that are required.

And, you mentioned the Sony sorry, the Microsoft Xbox adaptive controller which you just showed on the screen. And I know that Sony, for example, is working on project Leonardo, which is another kit for more comfortable play. And you've mentioned some of the quad stick, which is done by clearly like one guy, as you said, an independent kind of contractor.

Yeah. But, maybe I want to get your take before jumping into, how stuffable is tapping in. I want to talk a little bit about what, what the first parties are doing, right? And how they're pushing the space forward. You just said, for example, that the Xbox has really changed the name of the game with the adaptive controller.

What do you think about what Sony and Xbox is doing and in leading the charge in this space? And are there other entrants that are playing in here, besides someone like quad stick that are creating the hardware? Obviously you said there's also a lot of independent vendors for switches and stuff like that, but give us a little bit of a rundown on, who is doing what in terms of the actual hardware space.

Alexander: Yeah, like I said, Xbox was the first of the big brands to put their name behind building these adaptive hardware controls and shipped the Xbox adaptive controller a few years ago that very clearly indicated to the other players in the space that like there's economics to it and they need to start investing.

You mentioned Sony's Project Leonardo. That's, that became the called the Sony access controller, which they're shipping now. It looks a little different. I don't have one on hand.

Alexandra: Yeah. It's like the circles.

Alexander: Yeah. Yeah. So it's like a circle. There's a joystick on it. You can also swap out buttons along the circle.

And then the middle of the circle is also a button. You can buy two of them and link them together. You can also pair it up with a regular PlayStation controller, which you can also do with the Xbox adaptive controller and an Xbox controller playing in co pilot mode. Separate from Microsoft Co Pilot, this is just another name for another Co Pilot thing, but so what they've done in this space is actually said we realize that there is a massive market of gamers with disabilities who we want to be able to bring into our ecosystem.

I as Xbox want to have more players using it, buying Xboxes, playing Xbox or playing PC games. I, as Sony, want more people to be playing on PlayStation 5 and playing PlayStation games. Therefore, we need to break down some of the barriers and just make it possible. And so that's really what the sort of introduction of these new hardware devices has become.

In the Nintendo Switch space, because I haven't mentioned Nintendo yet, they don't have an official one, but they do have official partners that or shipping hardware. For example, there's one called the Hori Flex. H O R I Flex. Very much like an Xbox Adaptive Controller. Bunch of ports in the back for switches but it's designed for the Nintendo Switch.

And then there's also 8BitDo does some really cool arcade style buttons on the top of the controller as a means of making them more accessible. So there, there's definitely some really interesting sort of first party and like first party adjacent, hardware devices that are coming out and are out in order to, really make the space more accessible.

Alexandra: Got it. And what about in mobile? How's our, how's how's our biggest platform in games uh, dealing with this?

Alexander: So mobile is tricky. Native operating system wise, there's things like voice access and there, Android has face switch and stuff like that for some Android devices anyway.

The problem is that they don't really surface up the means to integrate them well into your mobile games. Meaning that yeah, you can have voice access, but it won't recognize a label in your UI that you're trying to ship unless you're using native Android SDKs and you're not building on, a graphics platform or an engine that is actually drawing the UI, not to get too much into the technical weeds of it, but it basically means that they don't really work in those games.

There are some switch devices similar to an Xbox Adaptive Control that are third party that can work with a mobile device and can be used to emulate taps in certain areas. But the other pain is that you have to configure that, and given how much screen interaction is typically expected with mobile games, it becomes a challenge.

So there's angles to take, just like in, you know, console and PC gaming, to make things accessible from the perception perspective. If you're using touchscreen inputs, especially games that are emulating the typical gamepad, but on touchscreen, you've got two joysticks, you've got some buttons.

Making those resizable and adaptable and repositionable can make a big difference. But outside of that, mobile is, there's a big gap in terms of making games really accessible. It's an area where we're trying to help solve, which is let's give developers the means to actually add adaptive controls natively into it in order to actually Make it so people can play those games.

But it's also hard on mobile because you are already pushing the resources of the device to the limits for the most part. And, unless you're on like the latest highest end tablet or phone, most of the times the game you're building is really eating up the CPU and integrated GPU. And so it's what's left to, to add, AI based accessibility or adaptive controls.

It's there's not much. But I think there's some interesting ways to solve that.

Alexandra: Yeah, it's actually just jogged my memory. There's a company called Backbone that's building controller stuff for mobile. You kind of wonder like, Oh isn't the point of playing on mobile?

Oh, you got a backbone. I have one. I love my backbone. Yeah. I've got a bunch of friends that work at at the company and I was trying to get them on air as well. So hopefully they, I would love to, talk about, their, what they're doing in the space for mobile hardware.

And ideally, it's a little bit counterintuitive because you think, Oh, we got to take away the controller. That's the whole point of mobile. But, in your perspective, if you had a controller, it's a lot easier to do some of the accessibility controls because you can do that extra kind of button mapping, which is pretty interesting.

But I guess this is actually a great place to start talking about how Cephebul plugs into this process. And you mentioned that what a lot of things that you're doing are to ameliorate some of the challenges that people are having on the mobile side. So tell me a little bit more about, what you guys are doing and how you guys are basically plugging into the gaming space.

Alexander: Yeah. So in general, Cephable, I know you mentioned this at the start of the podcast, but we're a software platform. Focus on integrating adaptive controls, like adaptive voice controls, camera based inputs, so tracking face expressions, head movements, gestures, multimodal controls, so being able to use your phone to do something on your PC or console or, your PC to do something on your phone or tablet.

And the way that We are focused in gaming. One our origins are in gaming. Like I said, my research led to how can I help my brother play Minecraft into how can I play dark souls three with just my voice to on the, how can we unlock these experiences for everyone? And so the way that we work with game developers is in a couple of ways, you can, especially if you're doing PC and console, you can integrate our like APIs and SDKs super easily to allow someone to use the existing stuffable apps as inputs, meaning that if you're building a game on PC, for example.

You can also allow a user to use the Cephable app on Windows and run camera controls and voice controls. You don't have to integrate those models or anything. You just receive inputs from the Cephable app and then map them to actions. So things like, when I tilt my head forward, I should be running forward in the game.

When I tilt my head I should start to strafe to the right. I should be able to open my mouth to jump. Or when I raise my eyebrows, I should do something. And I need to be able to say, open inventory or pause, or use voice commands for basically core actions out of the box. And then to be able to do that on console as well, where you might not have a camera and a microphone as a player, maybe a microphone, but likely not a camera plugged in empowering a player to use their PC or their phone or a tablet still with the Cephable app to pull up the camera from my phone, for example, in front of my face and be able to like, tilt and turn my head and have that do something on, my Xbox, my switch or my PlayStation.

I think it's more of a need when it comes to mobile. Because typically when someone's playing a mobile game, they're not going to have two devices, right? So the scenario of playing on a console and I'm using my phone's camera as an input isn't really relevant here because there's no two devices.

We're focused on supporting developers being able to run our camera controls and voice controls natively within their own games, on, in mobile especially. What's been really cool is we've been partnering with folks like Qualcomm to get all of our models running on the new mobile NPs, the neural processing units that ship with the NPs.

Most modern Android devices, especially and running on the neural engines on iOS to be able to not impact your game experience, right? Because the alternative that typically folks with disability see in the space is I need to turn down my graphic settings because my adaptive controls are acceptable or not, we're not the only ones out there.

Needs the GPU in order to run, or it needs more CPU resources in order to run. And when you get a mobile, it's not usually a thing that we play with, turning down graphics settings a lot. Maybe on some of the, larger like first person shooter games that are out, they have some settings, but.

Our goal is to basically like empower developers to actually reach and support more players with disabilities and ultimately drive business for them. And for our players to actually be able to unlock experiences that weren't accessible to them before. And so whatever means we, we have to do that, like that's the goal.

It's unlocking experiences and turning that into a value for the developer and the studio or the publisher.

Alexandra: Got it. So again, just to walk back basically What it is you basically are an app side interface, right? That allows maybe a person to interact with a game, even though that game may not have optimized for accessibility.

You have optimized for accessibility and players are. Path through settable, and so it in a way, you're a little bit like a two sided marketplace where you've got like all of the players looking for one thing and sorts of needs, but then you also have to be building settable to accommodate what games are doing.

And so I'd imagine there's actually some challenges there where there's certain genres or certain types of games that you've chosen to support first. You gave some examples of, if I want to run forward, I tilt my head forward. If I want to strafe left or strafe right. But imagine that I'm playing like.

A puzzle game or—

Alexander: Yeah.

Alexandra: A rogue light, or something like that, or a 2D side scroller. I'm sure all of those controls are really different. And so there's probably you probably have an a long list of, motion gesture controls that could potentially be applicable. And then there are games that have control schemes or a limited number of controls that map into.

That number, but what if you kind of run out of slots, if that makes sense? There's only so many, and maybe again, maybe this could be my own naivete, but I would presume there's only so many different facial expressions or gestures that I could make. And there are some games like that have just so many buttons.

So how do you work on that to make that the best for your players?

Alexander: Yeah. So you're totally right on, on what we do and some of the challenges we see in the space and the, and also where we are in the marketplace, right? Like several is free for individuals. We don't have to be like, players don't have to pay to use stuff.

They just use it. And we've got tons of people that use Cephal every day. And so we're trying to help basically marry them up with the game studios. When it comes to the input systems it's a couple of things, right? Like one. Yes, there's a limited number of things you can do with head movement and face expressions.

And also, that head movement or face expression would probably do something very different. We solve that in a few ways. One, we have pre built templates for basically every Typical category of game tap and swipes to competitive first person shooters, fast paced RPGs and things like that. And then we also really focus on empowering each player to customize those controls and also being able to do that in the South of the lab and not having to add a whole nother interface that you need to create your own app, of course you can let's say for example, like I'm an individual that, and I'm playing a 2d side scroller.

And so it tilts my head should have me run to the right. It tells me my head back should be able to jump or something like that. And do core movement stuff. Maybe opening my mouth is an attack or a dash or something like that, right? So let's start with the basics. What happens if I can't tilt my head to the right?

It's important to, for us to allow a user to customize how those inputs work. And so what we do for developers is we expose an API that allows you to basically list what are all the output actions that can happen in different context groups too. So you can either do a direct mapping, AKA tilting my head to the right is the same as holding the D key to strafe, and we can just say yeah, I'll just do the D key and we'll send that to your input system.

We also can just expose custom actions. And so, developers can choose, how complex they need that to be and how many things they do want to expose. And then we can basically pre build the default mapping. But also it's worth noting We, we have very few users that only use head based inputs.

Typically it's head and voice or it's head face and virtual buttons on an iPad that they can tap with the side of their hand or something like that, plus any other input, right? If I can press some buttons on a controller, or if I have an Xbox adaptive controller, PlayStation access controller, use those and stuffable at the same time, the focus, but so we haven't really run into issues where we find limitations because even in really complex games where there's a lot of different inputs and there's combos. We can match combos like I can combine tilting my head forward back and raising my eyebrows the same way that I could map pressing the right trigger the X button and up on the D pad at the same time.

But it's really more important to expose like what are the actual output goals and actions that a user is going to do contextually and how do we help set a strong default so most folks won't have to change things, but that's people still can go in and customize and adapt them.

It's get really strong defaults, get all the sort of mappings that we can out of the way. Contextually menu navigation is different than 3D player navigation. But I, when I pause, tilting my head up, should probably intuitively move up in the menu. Up and down in the menu.

Right, right. Versus, like, when I'm playing a, a first person RPG, moving my head up and down, I should probably expect to move my character. The, even just like, that basic context switch of like, person is in the menu, Head movement does this. Person is in the game. Head movement does this.

But yeah, it's really just about opening up the flexibility to the player to be able to personalize it.

Alexandra: Wow. First of all, it sounds like a tremendous solution. I'm sure that a lot of people find this to be really useful, because I think that level of customization is really impactful for how people can play.

And I think also this is a great time to also shift towards the business and economics of the space, because you mentioned that Suffable is actually free to players. And so I think I want to talk a little bit about You guys are doing all this great work for all these players.

And so I'm curious, how do you guys see building a business around Sephable if you, in, in general to continue to do and supply the number of people that work there, et cetera. Especially in a place where you've commented on the inverted relationship between the disability about.

resourcing for disabled gamers with disability, it's disability tax. And so you're going the other way, where you're saying, hey, I don't want anybody to pay the disability tax or limit it as much as possible, so I'm going to charge zero. So tell me a little bit about your business model and how you see that kind of going forward.

Alexander: Yeah, so we have two revenue models. One is, we license stuff as an employee accommodation to employers that have no income. Team members with access, with accessibility needs. So basically you can like, we do a lot in gaming, but we also do a lot in just like productivity apps and stuff like that.

The same way that I can map my head and voice movements to my character movements, menuing and things like that. I can do the same thing in PowerPoint and a lot more too. So we licensed in that space, but then also we, the other side that we do is we licensed to application and game developers to integrate the controls, not just to say, yeah, I added voice controls and good to go, but for us to actually bring you players.

For the way that we price things like that it's based off of essentially how many folks can we get to your game. And the way that we do that is. One, we literally highlight the games and apps that we're integrated into to be able to say like, hey, this is now accessible that may not have been before.

But also we work with large community partners from the Amputee Coalition to AbleGamers to the U. S. Department of Education and basically like putting, Things that are going to be more accessible in terms of experiences and getting them in front of the eyes of users. Especially like one of the challenges in general in the assistive tech and accessibility space is marketing to folks with disabilities.

There's been so much of a burden on individuals to try stuff to see if it's accessible only to find out that it's not. Yeah. That this sort of paradigm shift has happened where. People just assume it's not accessible to me until you tell me it is and you show me that it is. And so we're trying to be that means to help you actually make your game accessible or your other applications.

And then to actually tell people and show people and really just bring more players to you. So like the economic side of it is essentially if you can calculate your average customer acquisition cost, your CAC. We will be lower than that and just bring you more customers.

Alexandra: I see. Yeah, I guess I didn't, I guess I, you also have a little bit of this, like like I said, Oh, you are a two sided marketplace, but you really actually are a marketplace.

I didn't realize exactly that, but um, you know, so you basically currently how many games do you support? And I'm sure that's part of it. Is this Oh, we've support 20 or 30 games or something like that. How many games are on the platform or like, you've, you've…

Alexander: So we, we have the means to do it's about a hundred different PC games that we have a prebuilt control set up.

And then on the deeper integration side we're starting to ship our first few this year. There's a couple of indie games. It's mostly sort of AAA games that get the bigger economic side. I can't necessarily name them because the games aren't out yet, but they're coming out this year in the categories of really large edit, first person shooters Third person RPGs and a couple of mobile games too.

Alexandra: Okay. Awesome. That's a hundred. It's we're getting, they're getting there. And I'm sure you're obviously somewhat selective. You've looked at, what are the games that people are most interested in playing? What's like the game that has like the most, demand, from this community of players that like, they, people wish they would be able to play. And I guess we, this is basically, you're an interface, in a marketplace for these kinds of things. And we talked a little bit about the adaptive controllers, being more expensive than regular controllers.

I think you said like dual sense, I think dual sense controllers are like. Sony's are like 89 99, but you could definitely buy like a cheaper PlayStation controller for 50 bucks. But I think a lot of the adaptive controllers that both Sony and X Box do are somewhere in the a hundred buck range.

And and then, so there's that on the hardware side for the, then that's a cost to the player. And then there's all of the extra voice work or the extra subtitling or the extra haptics that all cost money that the studio has to do. And so when we think about the economics of this space, at the end of the day, most of these places and corporations are businesses, right?

And they're going to do an NPV analysis and they're going to say, Hey, I have to spend X more to to basically make this game accessible and am I going, are there gamers that I'm going to acquire that are going to offset those costs or are the gamers that I am acquiring, no matter how small or big they are, do they tend to have a really high LTV, right?

Do you think that there's anything in this model, the way that people think about this? That needs to change in order to make the economics work. Because, from a one, two quick glance, based on what you just said, the economics don't work that well, but I'm not sure, maybe I'm underestimating the market size and potentially also underestimating the time spent in games for those players.

Alexander: Yeah. So a couple of things to know around players with disabilities, specifically it's research that came out of scopes that was like. Basically highlighted players with disabilities tend to have way more loyalty to a game and have a higher LTV in general. They also spend on average 2. 3 times as much on game purchases as their disabled counterparts do in the market.

So like a player with disability is sticky because there's not very many games out there, honestly, are accessible to the ones that they can play, they stay with. But also the actual market size is large. Even if you take some of the smaller estimated numbers, 50 million although there's an estimated 33 million gamers with disabilities just in the U.

S. Let's say you could go actually capture 1 percent of them. With 300, 000 players, that's, It's not a lot, but it's also not small. How much do you have to spend to go get 300, 000 players to actually play your game typically it's, if you're in the mobile space, it's a good.

Alexandra: Yeah.

Alexander: So the way that we sort of look at it is can we one, unlock that section of the market in general? Because otherwise it's you just don't have access to it. And two, can we just make that cost lower? And so far the answer has been yes. And. It's also, one of the reasons why we see especially larger studios that have much larger costs on feature development, typically actually investing in, in, in accessibility features, because the numbers are starting to come out over the last sort of three or four years where there's been this sort of wave of people really focus on accessibility implementations where it's like, Oh, it is paying off, and not that it's necessarily the best thing, it's not just paying off in the form of.

Bringing in new players with disabilities. It's also paying off in the form of more positive marketing and brands. Yes, sure. People like to hear that a game is accessible and that everyone can play it. And that it's been done with thought. More than just the players with disabilities themselves.

And in the sort of economic side of it is like there's definitely have to spend money to make money when it comes to player acquisition. And in a lot of ways, like, when it comes to custom feature development, it can be expensive. And it's also one of the areas that we're trying to disrupt, like, how can I make it a no brainer for a game developer to add separable controls to their game?

Because it's just gonna get them more players and it's not gonna cost them a whole lot. That's the thing that we're trying to break. Not just in the gaming space too, in any application we work with productivity apps and creativity apps and Code editors and stuff like that.

Same. It's the same economics. Can we unlock enough users for you to make it worth it? So far it's been yes. But only time will tell as more people invest in it. The ones that invest earlier are going to be the ones that win.

Alexandra: Got it. Yeah. I we're almost up on, on time for us.

And I really appreciate those, the answers to those questions. And I think it is a space that we're still solving the problems. I love the example of it should be a no brainer, to basically build in this way. And so I guess that kind of brings us to our last topic, which is, what more can be done, and, you pointed out that some of the first party studios, the bigger games that I'm sorry, the bigger cities and the bigger games that have resources are like, Oh, this is a no brainer because I'm it's almost like just a market expansion. You're like, okay, like I could, expand to the India gaming market, but I can also expand to those with disabilities.

It's just another customer acquisition tool. And they have a lot of resources to actually build against it, execute the plan, et cetera. But if I am a smaller studio, and I should, and I, and let's just say, I want to really devote myself to, to my studio and my game and bringing this forward, but I don't know where to start.

Okay. Where should I start? And what groups support this space? And what are like the low hanging fruit that I can do that is maybe not the most complicated, like custom UI or, some of the, like this things that you were saying, Forza was doing with the neural networks, where can I begin?

Alexander: Yeah. I would honestly say first AbleGamers APX certification. It's cheap and they're so amazing at like actually breaking down how to execute some of these things easily. They work with big studios too, but. So many indie developers that I've talked to, it's also some of them have discovered us through that, but so many of them have said this was worth the like few hours and time to like really get into the details.

But I would say like that start with intention from the beginning, because even if you're not building every single thing in the most accessible way possible. One of the things that I think people have a misconception about when it comes to accessibility is that it's an all or nothing game, and it's not.

Adding any amount of intention to accessibility from the start is going to make your game attractive to more people. If it's just simple resizing and remapping of controls, you just unlocked your game for hundreds of thousands of people that otherwise couldn't play your game. Just that simple of an implementation from the start.

So I'd say start there. And then if you're interested in getting into the way more advanced stuff and adding, new types of inputs, that's where things like what we do at Suffable can try to make that a lot easier. But there's, it really just comes down to having the intention to get something done, even if you're on a lower budget, and just talking to the disability community about what they need.

You'll find that it's not, Big ask to get started. The bigger ask is like, how do we make it a truly equitable experience for literally everybody, but it doesn't need to be all in in order to create value.

Alexandra: Got it. And then I also want to close with asking, what is, that's clearly what studios can do.

Just just starting from getting that able, you said, able gamer certification and starting there, what do you think is like one thing that platform should be doing better. Players should be doing better and maybe like external and adjacent players like yourself should be doing better.

Alexander: Yeah. I would say for players let's not be gatekeepers. Like first and foremost, like that's an obvious one. Hey, someone added a difficulty setting. Let's not trash on the game. You can still go play at the highest difficulty setting and feel proud about yourself without trashing others. And shout out to the Elden Ring community that gets mad when people use summons and it's a feature of the game kind of thing.

Let's stop doing that. First and foremost. When it comes to the platforms, I think that there's a lot that can be done to enable adaptive controls and features that don't put more weight on studios. I think the hardware side has done a great job at that. From the Xbox Adaptive Controller, PlayStation Access Controller, it's hey, this is just a controller to the game developer, but obviously to the player it's something new.

But we need more of that outside of just the physical inputs, for sure. And supporting, basically supporting developers and making it easier to make games accessible. Same with some of the engines as well. What can we do for really popular engines that so many, especially indie games are built on to actually make it easy to make accessible.

I think there's a lot of work to be done there too. And for third party platforms and things like that. It's really just about listening to the developers and listening to the community of players too and trying to be that bridge. And that's really what we do with intention.

And we work every day with our users, we work every day with our partners that are also working with our users and players. And it's really just trying to build more of a build more of a community around it. That's supportive instead of trying to geeky.

Alexandra: Awesome. Terrific. Alex, thank you so much for coming on.

This was such an amazing conversation, learned a lot about, what the do's and don'ts of this space. And I think it's really inspiring what you're working on. And I think it's really valuable for a lot of studios to pay attention to this because I think, again, one, we obviously are serving a, a market that might be.

Quote unquote, based on the cert, like the the who survey, like you cannot do this thing by yourself, but it also is just accessibility in general for people. Regardless if you even want to just do, there's like you're starting at the highest level. And then if you have button mapping, even a regular person could preferentially prefer button mapping.

So that extra layer of customization is actually probably just beneficial to the whole gaming population in general But thank you so much for coming on. If people want to get in touch with you how can they do that?

Alexander: Yeah, so we're at Cephable, C E P H A B L E, literally everywhere. And you'll find me personally on the internet as SuavePirate.

So on Twitter, on Twitch, on YouTube, even my LinkedIn URL is linkedin. com slash in slash SuavePirate. It's been my, my gaming handle forever that I generated when I found out that Alex Dunn is the most generic name that's existed on the internet. So I had to do something new.

Alexandra: I see. Yeah, I think I actually noticed that when I was I was like so I'll pirate okay, but very cool.

All right. As always friends this is the top of our episode or the end of our episode. If you've got feedback or ideas please hit me up at [email protected]. I'm always open. And with that I'll see you next time. Thanks, Alex.

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