Squirelo’s passion for Accessibility is twofold. He grew up around friends and family who live with disabilities and also had ADHD. Furthermore, he has a strong desire to help people. The release of playability, which begins to roll out late last year, is the culmination of years of cooperation efforts with its Twitch community to create a program that pushes the boundaries and understanding of accessible software.

“I always had a community on twitch of people with disabilities and we’ve already tried to find things,” he says. Those players helped Squirelo from the beginning to provide advice, test new functions and eventually give people tools to help them play.

Squirelo’s creation seeks to target the individualistic nature of the disabled experience. While customizable hardware such as the Xbox Adaptive Controller and PlayStation’s Access Controller offers adjustment through different buttons, switches, sticks and buttons, players who are disabled are still limited to aspects such as desktop space, individual power and energy levels, and even their finances. A basic playability account is free and lets players just about any game available on a computer controlled by any facial movements they have.

For Eduard Poch Squirelo’s vision clearly. As a child, Poch’s strength and skill allowed him to use standard controllers. As he got older and progressed his disability and limited his hand movements, he had to rely on adaptable equipment. While accessible hardware was beneficial, his individualistic experience prevented him from fully using devices on the market.

“That’s why I bought a computer because it was easier for me to use the keyboard and mouse,” says Poch. “Nevertheless, I struggle to reach certain buttons because I can only have one hand on the left part of the keyboard. Thanks to the playability, I can immediately use a larger number of buttons with a simple movement of the face. “

Poch’s experience of buying numerous devices to find the right solution speaks to a problem that every disabled person encounters in the game: the cost of playing. For those relying on fixed income, they can expect to spend more than $ 300 for a full Xbox Adaptive Controller setup, and about $ 250 for a complete set of access managers. Combine it with the need to buy extra switches, buttons and third-party sellers, and adjustment device can cost the same as a console.

Playability costs significantly less. Even the unlimited premium plan is only a one -time payment of € 129 ($ 132). The only equipment required is a standard web cam. And while the cost of playability is an issue for which disabled players must account for, it is compared to finding a customizable hardware setup that may not even work like the disability of an individual.

In some of the program’s promotional material, playability refers to the technology used as ‘prominent AI’, but Squirelo admits that the technology behind the software is not the well -driven things that people think when they hear ‘ai’ these days. “We use computer vision in a way, but we can call it ai,” he says. Instead, playability functions with algorithms that translate facial movements into game actions. It was especially beneficial if it was the cost of developing the program.