Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
For Ben Heck, it started as a kindness. He was an engineer who made cool things and a veteran reached out to see if he could make him an Xbox controller that would let him play video games with one hand. Twenty years later, he’s still making controllers for people with limb differences. But he’s not the only one.
In the two decades since Heck started modding Xbox controllers for accessibility purposes, a community of controller modders have sprung up. The challenge of making hardware accessible is that everyone has a different need, and often times those needs can be at odds with one another. One person may need a super sensitive joystick while another might need a joystick that responds to the most intense of inputs. Modding a…
