Don't Be Lazy! Remappable Keys Mean Greater Accessibility for All

Remappable controls are still common in PC gaming, but are extremely rare in the world of console gaming. It is not unheard of for a console game to allow full remapping of controls, but it is far more common for games to offer a finite set of predefined control schemes, presumably because this is easier for the Quality Assurance process.

Fully remappable controls allow users to define the game inputs irrespective of the hardware they are using to control the game. Predefined control schemes may not suit specialist interface hardware, of the sort required by users with significant mobility problems, and are thus a barrier to accessibility.

It may be that developers are avoiding remappable controls on consoles because of the problems they produce in QA. This is understandable, but this problem isn't going to disappear if developers don't start tackling it. If necessary, we can petition the console manufacturers to provide support for this kind of feature in the tools they supply for development, but this would be easier to achieve if developers joined in the crusade to establish remappable controls as an industry standard.