When it’s his turn to draw a card, Cristian M. Amores doesn’t look at anything: he points his iPhone camera at a QR code stuck to the sleeve and waits for VoiceOver to tell him what he has just drawn. He is blind and, since late 2020, has been adapting, card by card, the way he plays “Magic: The Gathering”, the collectible card game created in 1993 by mathematician and doctor Richard Garfield.
Amores shares the process under the name Magic Accesible on social network X, and his case is far from isolated: from controllers reprogrammed button by button to board games with raised pieces, accessibility is steadily gaining ground in the industry, although it is still a long way from being a standard design rule, whether for a big-budget video game or a casual game round the table.
The Magic deck that is read with a phone camera
Amores’ first attempt was braille. Using a Dymo-style label maker, he marked each card with a raised number so he could tell them apart and look up their details in a separate database. In practice, it didn’t work for several reasons: braille lettering is bulky and makes the card thicker, the deck became too chunky to shuffle easily and, in an official tournament, a marked card can be treated as a signal of what you do or don’t want to draw, which automatically gets you thrown out of the competition.
For a while, that QR code was his solution, but it is not the one he uses any more: having to line up the camera without being sure the card had scanned correctly made the game slower than playing without any aid, so he abandoned it. Now he uses NFC tags, which only need to be brought close to the phone for the screen reader to read the whole card out loud, with no need to focus or wait. “Since then I’ve taken a huge leap as a player”, he sums up.
He only has to type in a card’s number for the rest of the columns to fill in automatically. He used to scan the QR codes with the iPhone’s code scanner and follow the game with VoiceOver, the screen reader built into Apple devices.
The project still needs help from others: someone to read a new card out loud before he adds it to the database, a print shop to produce the QR codes at a small size, but it has allowed him to play in shops and in the National Modern Championship (another MTG format) held in Soria in December 2024, where he had his own stand explaining the system. In November 2022, the newspaper El Mundo ran a feature on his story, and since then he has kept up a podcast under the same name as his social media account, Magic Accesible, in which he interviews other players and developers in the sector.
Amores has not yet competed in tournaments with strict rules, only in more informal games. In Soria, several judges came over to find out how the system works; one told him there would probably be no problem in using it in competition.
In another match, a different judge did check the rulebook and confirmed that tournaments ban electronic devices during play except in cases of strict necessity, an exception Amores believes could apply to him: until he passes the card over his phone, he has no idea what he has just drawn, and all his cards are marked in the same way. If he ever plays competitively, he says, he will inform the organisers in advance, both because of the adaptations and because he usually needs a little more time per round than other players.
Asked what single thing he would request from Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes “Magic: The Gathering”, he doesn’t hesitate: an accessible version of Magic Arena, the game’s official PC client, which would instantly reach blind people anywhere in the world. There is already a community-made “mod” that achieves this, although, like any unofficial solution, it depends on the company not blocking it or breaking it with an update.
“WotC, let the ‘mod’ carry on existing,” he says directly, although he clarifies that he himself has not yet tried it. On physical cards he is more sceptical: he imagines cards with a factory-printed QR code linking to Gatherer, the company’s official database, but doubts that it would be worthwhile for Wizards at that scale. “Paper will put up with anything, but reality won’t,” he concludes.
From braille to NFC: the Commander deck a group of friends adapted from scratch
Amores is not the only one to have arrived at NFC tags by the same route. On Reddit, under the username jerichodarkstar, a group of friends explained how they adapted the Commander deck (a format within MTG) of one of their group, who was born with a degenerative visual impairment.
He started playing Commander in 2023, although by then he could already only tell lands from non-lands by their shape; for everything else he needed someone sitting nearby to read out loud every card he drew. The problem was not only the dependency: because the whole table heard what he had in his hand, he was playing under what the group describe as a permanent “telepathy effect” that nobody else had to deal with.
At Christmas 2025, fed up with the unfair disadvantage, they decided to change things. The first attempt was braille: they embossed, on the sleeve of each card and never on the card itself, its name, mana cost, type and the creature’s power and toughness, placing each piece of information near where it appears on the original.
The card effects were the real problem: you cannot fit all the text from a card onto a single sleeve, so they came up with their own system of abbre. “If you read it literally, it would sound like it was written by a caveman,” admits jerichodarkstar
They took between three and four days to braille the whole deck, but the system did not survive actual play: after two months of gaming, the embossing was already wearing away, each brailled sleeve ended up double or even quadruple its normal thickness, shuffling became a nightmare and the deck would not even stay neatly in a single pile because of how uneven it was.
They stumbled on the alternative almost by chance. They posted an update about the problem on Reddit, but the post vanished. The clue came from a comment on the original thread: a user, whose mention they were expressly authorised to include, told them that the games shop where he usually plays had a blind customer who used NFC tags.
The group started researching and, within days, had ordered the tags and built a new system: an NFC tag inside each sleeve, linkedl the information for that card. When he brings the phone close, the screen reader reads the note through an earpiece, with no need for abbre
The leap was dramatic: what had taken three or four days in braille can now be done in around three hours per deck. They have been playing this way for almost a year, with four complete 100-card decks and two more under construction.
Gloria and Iria: advising publishers from inside and outside disability
In Spain, much of this work is also done by people outside the big organisations. Proyecto Glirp has been run by Gloria and Iria since 2014, when they started with a blog focused on visual disability, versinlimitesaccesibilidad. Iria has a visual disability; Gloria handles the technical and audiovisual side of the project
Over the years, board games have steadily taken over from the rest of their content – technology, books, travel – until they became their main focus: they advise publishers, give talks and lead workshops on cultural accessibility in fields such as tourism and education, and this year they have published their own book, “Jugar sin límites”, focused on accessibility in games.
In that book they review the design mistakes that crop up most often in tabletop games, and, they say, they are almost always the same: the contrast between letters or icons and the background, and a font size which, whether for aesthetic reasons or for lack of space, is usually too small.
For Gloria and Iria this is not just a vision issue: “The less effort you have to make to work out what an element says, the faster you will understand it,” they explain, so it is also a question of how long it takes any player to grasp what they have in front of them.
Asked whether any publisher stands out for tackling this well, they answer cautiously: they do not think any of them has made these improvements standard practice, although they acknowledge that those publishing games for children usually pay more attention to these details.
The obstacle most often overlooked by people without a visual disability, they say, is not on the board but at the table. Visual disability covers many degrees, from total blindness to significant residual vision, and every player with it has their own needs; what almost never happens is that anyone asks what support they need.
“Quite often the lack of accessibility in a game can be eased by words or by descriptions,” they point out, without touching a single physical component. Someone might not be able to see what is on the board, which cards are available or how other players are progressing, and it can be enough for the rest of the table to narrate their actions out loud to fix it. They acknowledge, though, that there are games whose mechanics make even that solution impossible.
When a publisher calls them in, accessibility rarely comes pre-planned from the start. Gloria and Iria describe a sector that is moving forward but with no consistent path: “There are games where more effort is put into making them inclusive, and then the next one published can be the complete opposite.”
They work with some publishers and authors who consult them during the design process itself, but more often the reverse happens: they are the ones who play a title that is already on the market and, in their review, point out what could be improved and how.
The stage at which they come in does change the outcome. It is not the same to design something inclusive from the outset as to add or modify components later on. “If you’re just starting to design something and you already have guidelines or recommendations for improving its accessibility, you save yourself the work of having to redo it later to fix certain aspects.”
Controllers redesigned piece by piece
Microsoft launched its device on 4 September 2018 at 87 euros, developed together with organisations such as AbleGamers, SpecialEffect, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation and Craig Hospital. Instead of a hand-shaped controller, it is a flat panel with two large buttons, a D-pad and 19 3.5 mm ports plus two USB ports to plug in the switches, joysticks or mounts that many players with limited mobility already owned, and to remap them
It can be used with a hand, a foot, the chin or the mouth; even the packaging was designed so it can be opened with a single finger or with the teeth. In 2025, as part of the Ability Summit, Microsoft added the Xbox Adaptive Joystick, a one-handed controller costing 26 euros that can work on its own or as a complement to the Adaptive Controller.
Sony unveiled its answer at CES 2023 under the name Project Leonardo and released it as the Access Controller on 6 December that year, priced at 87 euros. It is circular, can be used resting on a table or fixed to a mount, and brings together eight buttons and a central joystick, all interchangeable for pieces of different shapes and sizes depending on each player’s strength or range of movement.
It allows up to 30 profiles to be created and two Access Controllers to be used in sync, or one together with a standard DualSense, combining inputs from more than one device. Its weak spot, flagged up since launch, is that it does not reproduce the touchpad or motion sensors from the DualSense, which is a drawback in games that rely on them.
Video-game accessibility is no longer a niche
The numbers explain why the big manufacturers keep investing in this. 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 it is very important for a game to include accessibility options when they are deciding what to play
The World Health Organization estimates that more than 1 billion people worldwide – more than one in six – have a disability, and Microsoft cited in 2025 a figure of 429 million players with disabilities across the globe when presenting its own Xbox tools
That same year, the ESA, together with Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Ubisoft and other companies, set up the Accessible Games Initiative, a shared, voluntary labelling system so that a game’s listing in an online shop shows at a glance whether it includes adjustable text, large subtitles, narrated menus or remappable controls
Some titles are already cited as benchmarks: “The Last of Us Part II” added audio description to all its cut-scenes and an option that turns spoken dialogue into vibrations on the DualSense controller, so that a deaf or hard-of-hearing player can feel the rhythm and emphasis of a line as well as reading it in the subtitles. In Spain, Fundación ONCE runs a parallel project focused on video games, Ga11y(source in Spanish), which catalogues accessible titles according to the type of disability they cater for.
When the challenge is telling pieces apart by touch
Beyond homemade solutions, manufacturers and organisations have been releasing accessible board games straight out of the factory for years. In the United States, Mattel developed UNO Braille with the National Federation of the Blind, with markings on every card and rules downloadable in braille or as an audio narration
In Spain, ONCE, through its Bibliographic Service and its foundation, has adapted, among others, the puzzle “Katamino” with braille pieces and board, the game “Apalabrados” in collaboration with Etermax, a domino set with raised tiles, an adapted “Scrabble” and a braille edition of the card game “Virus!”, not counting the classics that are now standard: chess and ludo with raised boards, and Spanish and poker decks labelled in braille.
The challenge is the same in all these adaptations: making pieces distinguishable by touch, giving the boards depth and transferring the text on the cards – the hardest part, because it is purely visual – into braille, embossing or, increasingly, a QR code with spoken descriptions, because nobody wants to be left out and miss the game.
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