During Sony’s CES 2023 presentation, we got our first look at Project Leonardo, what Sony calls a “highly customizable accessibility controller kit” for PS5.
A PlayStation Blog post that went live shortly after its reveal goes into greater detail than Jim Ryan did in his time on stage at CES 2023, but the high-level takeaway is that this is potentially Sony’s first massive hardware leap forward for making its games truly accessible to all players.
“Accessibility is an important topic to us at PlayStation,” senior vice president Hideaki Nishino begins in the blog post. “We want to continue raising the bar to enable every gamer to experience the joy of play.”
Project Leonardo was also designed through “conversations” with organizations like AbleGamers, SpecialEffect and Stack Up, though it’s unclear as to how much input the organizations had on the device, and how far the collaboration went.
According to Nishino, Leonardo is “built to address common challenges faced by many players with limited motor control including difficulty holding a controller for long periods, accurately pressing small clusters of buttons or triggers, or positioning thumbs and fingers optimally on a standard controller.”
A new video published shortly after the presentation features multiple accessibility experts talking on PlayStation’s new Project Leonardo.
Project Leonardo can be used in conjunction with a second Leonardo controller or a DualSense controller, and is extremely customizable so that players can create the controller that is perfectly suitable to their needs.
For now, the controller is still “currently in development” says Nishino, and that Sony continues to “gather valuable feedback from the community.”
At the very least, Leonardo looks like it hold a promising future for accessibility on PlayStation.
Source – [PlayStation Blog]
