Blind Players Are Rewriting Game Accessibility With NFC Tags and Adapted Controllers
When it is his turn to draw a card, Cristian M. Amores does not look at anything: he holds his iPhone close to a tag fixed inside the card sleeve and waits for the built-in screen reader to read the card out loud. Amores is blind and has been adapting Magic: The Gathering, the collectible card game created in 1993, card by card since late 2020, Euronews reported on 21 September 2026. He documents the process on social network X under the name Magic Accesible.
His first attempt used a Dymo-style label maker to emboss a raised number on each card so he could identify it against a separate database. The approach failed in practice: the braille lettering made the deck too thick to shuffle, and in official tournaments a marked card can be read as a signal of intent and lead to disqualification. He then attached QR codes that VoiceOver could scan, but lining up the camera reliably proved slow enough to make play harder than playing unaided, so he abandoned it. NFC tags, which need only be brought close to the phone, became his working solution. "Since then I've taken a huge leap as a player," he said. The system still depends on others, including someone to read new cards aloud before they are added to his database, but it has let him play in shops and at the National Modern Championship held in Soria in December 2024, where he ran a stand explaining how it works.
Amores is not alone in arriving at the same answer. A group of friends on Reddit, posting as jerichodarkstar, adapted a 100-card Commander deck for one of their group who was born with a degenerative visual impairment and could by 2023 only distinguish lands from non-lands by shape. Their first attempt embossed card names, mana costs and creature stats directly onto sleeves; it took three to four days per deck and the embossing had worn away after two months of play, while the thickened sleeves made shuffling and stacking impractical. A comment pointing to a games shop with a blind customer who used NFC tags led them to rebuild the system with a tag inside each sleeve linked through Apple's Shortcuts app. The same deck now takes roughly three hours to adapt, and the group has been playing that way for almost a year with four complete 100-card decks and two more under construction.
In Spain, Gloria and Iria have advised publishers, run workshops and published the book "Jugar sin limites" through their project Glirp, which began in 2014 as a blog on visual disability. They say the design mistakes they encounter in tabletop games are consistently the same: insufficient contrast between text or icons and their background, and font sizes kept small for aesthetic or space reasons. They argue the effect is broader than vision, since less effort spent deciphering an element means faster comprehension for every player. Their most-cited overlooked barrier is not on the board but at the table: visual disability ranges from total blindness to significant residual vision, and players with it are almost never asked what support they need. "Quite often the lack of accessibility in a game can be eased by words or by descriptions," they told Euronews, without changing a single component. "There are games where more effort is put into making them inclusive, and then the next one published can be the complete opposite," they added.
Console makers have invested in dedicated hardware. Microsoft launched the Xbox Adaptive Controller on 4 September 2018 at 87 euros, developed with organisations including AbleGamers, SpecialEffect, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation and Craig Hospital. Rather than a hand-shaped shell, it is a flat panel with two large buttons, a directional pad and 19 3.5 mm ports plus two USB ports for the switches, joysticks and mounts many players with limited mobility already own, remappable through an app; the packaging itself was designed to be opened with one finger or with the teeth. In 2025, as part of its Ability Summit, Microsoft added the Xbox Adaptive Joystick, a one-handed controller priced at 26 euros. Sony unveiled its reply at CES 2023 as Project Leonardo and shipped it as the Access Controller on 6 December 2023, also priced at 87 euros. It is circular, can rest on a table or be mounted, and combines eight interchangeable buttons with a central joystick, supporting up to 30 profiles and simultaneous use of two Access Controllers or one alongside a standard DualSense. Its acknowledged weakness, flagged since launch, is that it does not reproduce the DualSense touchpad or motion sensors, which matters in games that rely on them.
The commercial case for that investment is measurable. According to the Entertainment Software Association's 2025 annual survey, 21% of adult players in the United States report having a disability, and almost half say accessibility options are very important when choosing what to play. The World Health Organization estimates that more than one billion people, more than one in six worldwide, have a disability, and Microsoft cited 429 million players with disabilities globally when presenting its Xbox accessibility tools in 2025. That year the ESA, together with Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony and Ubisoft, established the Accessible Games Initiative, a voluntary labelling scheme that shows at a glance in a store listing whether a game offers adjustable text, large subtitles, narrated menus or remappable controls. Titles such as The Last of Us Part II are already held up as benchmarks for adding audio description to every cut-scene and converting spoken dialogue into vibrations on the DualSense controller for deaf and hard-of-hearing players.
On the tabletop side, factory-made accessible editions have existed for years. Mattel developed UNO Braille with the National Federation of the Blind, marking every card and offering rules in braille or as an audio narration. In Spain, ONCE and its foundation have adapted titles including the puzzle Katamino with braille pieces and board, the word game Apalabrados in collaboration with Etermax, a domino set with raised tiles, an adapted Scrabble and a braille edition of the card game Virus!, alongside staples such as chess, ludo and Spanish and poker decks labelled in braille. Across every adaptation the hardest task is the same: making pieces distinguishable by touch, giving boards depth and transferring purely visual card text into braille, embossing or, increasingly, a code that speaks.