Accessibility is getting more and more prominence in the gaming space, especially as the hobby gets more and more accepted by the public. The games themselves are getting more and more such options to cater to players of all sorts, with things like colour blind options to allowing you to hold buttons rather than mash them during some quick-time event (QTE) segments. Now, PlayStation has a new controller kit made specifically with accessibility in mind, which the company calls Project Leonardo.
Unveiled as part of the Sony showcase at CES 2023, the Project Leonardo controller kit can be used on its own, as a pair, or with a DualSense controller. The buttons themselves are arranged in a circular disc pattern with the analogue stick being extended out from the disc sctructure. Each one looks to have enough buttons for one half of a DualSense controller, and up to two can be paired with a single DualSense for their inputs to be recognised as coming from a single controller.
There’s a pretty high degree of customisability here. You can not only program buttons on the Project Leonardo controllers to do different things, you can also swap out the cap and print on each button to indicate the change. There’s also the option to make a single button register two different inputs, as well as the option to bridge two buttons together. Naturally, users can also save profiles on the software side of things if they’ve set up different configurations for different games.
The accessibility options don’t end there either. Each Project Leonardo controller also comes with four 3.5mm audio jacks, for those who need more accessibility-focused accessories.
As the name suggests, Project Leonardo is still currently in development despite the CES 2023 reveal. Therefore, it doesn’t yet have a release date or price. It will probably take awhile for that to happen, and when it does, it will also likely come with quite the heftier price tag than the regular DualSense controller.
(Source: PlayStation)
