Shared Control for Game Accessibility: Understanding Current Human Cooperation Practices to Inform the Design of Partial Automation Solutions
Dragan Ahmetovic, Matteo Manzoni, Filippo Corti, Sergio Mascetti · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26) · doi:10.1145/3772318.3791080
Summary
This CHI 2026 paper investigates 'shared control' in video games — an accessibility practice in which a player with a disability (the 'pilot') delegates inaccessible game actions to another agent (the 'copilot') so the pair jointly drive a single character. Shared control is already supported by commercial tools such as Microsoft's Xbox Controller Assist (formerly Xbox Copilot), Sony's PS5 Access Controller, and third-party adapters such as the Titan Two, yet it has received little systematic study. The authors ask three questions: how is shared control actually used today, which accessibility barriers does it address, and how might the human copilot be replaced (wholly or partly) by a software agent — an approach the authors call 'partial automation'. They conducted four individual interviews and four focus groups with 14 participants recruited via r/disabledgamers, an Italian association for people with motor impairments, and accessibility specialist networks. Participants filled the roles of pilot, copilot, and/or expert, with disabilities including paresis, blindness, spastic tetraparesis, muscular dystrophy, pediatric tetraparesis, and reduced arm mobility, and played across Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC, smartphone, and tablet. Sessions ran 60–90 minutes on video-call platforms and were analysed with reflexive thematic analysis. In the second half of each session the researchers described a hypothetical partial-automation system and elicited reactions, producing six themes: benefits and limitations of shared control, limitations that automation might address, copilot interventions, negotiating collaboration, interaction, and factors affecting collaboration.
Key findings
Shared control enables access to games that no other assistive technology can unlock, but its reliance on a co-located, available, and game-competent human is a fundamental limitation. Participants identified five distinct copilot interventions: assistance during game setup, assistance with menu access (often navigated via OCR because in-game menus are rarely accessible), assistance by playing (directly controlling some actions), assistance by signaling on-screen events (vital for blind pilots), and assistance by suggesting strategies. Control divisions are negotiated using three policies: assigning controls the pilot cannot reach, preserving the pilot's sense of agency over core actions, and splitting by macro-functionality. Copilot operational autonomy ranges from pure actuator (step-by-step instructions) to fully autonomous play, with most pilots preferring an autonomous, game-literate copilot to avoid feeling the copilot is merely a puppet. Participants broadly welcomed partial automation for autonomy, availability, and multiplayer access — but flagged 'automation confusion', loss of social bonding, ethical concerns about cheating in multiplayer, and the 'curse of dimensionality' when multiple concurrent controls must be coordinated. The paper distils 10 design guidelines (G1–G10) covering control delegation, information provision, setup assistance, autonomy, sociality, subdivision policies, copilot operational autonomy, and pilot–copilot communication and intent understanding.
Relevance
For accessibility practitioners this paper reframes gaming accessibility as a mixed-ability, collaborative activity rather than a pure independence problem, drawing an explicit parallel to domains like guide robots, smart wheelchairs, and surgical augmentation where shared control is already studied. The design guidelines (Table 3) are immediately actionable for anyone building AI copilots, adaptive controllers, or accessible game modes: support fully customisable control subdivision, preserve the pilot's sense of agency on high-value inputs, provide on-demand and proactive information without spoiling the game, and expose tunable operational autonomy so the copilot can act as actuator, collaborator, or autonomous agent. The findings also matter for non-gaming contexts — any assistive technology that mediates human help (photo description, wayfinding, shopping assistance) faces the same tensions around availability, agency, social bonding, and automation confusion. Limitations: 14 Western participants, mostly motor-impaired, no participants with cognitive or hearing impairments, and no one with hands-on partial-automation experience, so reactions to automation remain speculative.
Tags: game accessibility · shared control · partial automation · human-AI collaboration · motor disability · blindness · qualitative research · assistive technology · user autonomy · reflexive thematic analysis