You’re entirely right that accommodations such as these are often easily exploited by the unscrupulous, across all kinds of settings, and this does indeed often lead to those accommodations being policed in ways that are harmful to the people who actually need them. However, a game console is a far more delimited thing than, say, a parking lot. And unlike disneyland or an airline, you can’t socially engineer a USB controller into giving you extra functionality. So on this level, the transferability of those examples is dubious at best.
It’s also well worth remembering that before the Xbox Adaptive Controller, any kind of accessible gameplay tended to require either hand-built specialty controllers (think Ben Heck’s one-handed controllers and their like), extremely expensive specialty hardware, or a mix of both. The Adaptive Controller has massively lowered the barrier of entry for accessible gaming - and is also pretty poorly suited to cheating as it doesn’t allow for complex macros, high-speed repeated button presses, or other functionality desired for cheating, and is rather large and cumbersome for those purposes.
This obviously doesn’t mean this one controller solves every accessibility problem - far from it! - and even with its compatibility with all kinds of external buttons and inputs it still is far from perfect, and a lot of those inputs (like blow tubes or other mouth-controlled inputs) are still quite expensive. But it’s a great demonstration of how the best solutions for things like this come when first and third parties work together. To go back to the ill-fitting parking space analogy: what are accessible parking spots, if not first-party accessibility features? Sure, they don’t do everything for everyone, but it sure beats double parking and getting a fine, or not being able to park at all.
There is one obvious necessity with all of this that I completely understand is a cause for worry: relying on first party support means, well, relying on profit-oriented corporations to support you. And that’s never a given. But at least for the time being, this does seem to be the current industry trend, in line with the overall capitalist desire to expand markets as much as possible (as most markets are more or less saturated these days). Can we trust this to go on forever? Of course not - we need continuous work to ensure that it does, on all levels from policy to hardware production. And we still need the on-the-ground enthusiasts and hardware hackers that come up with new and innovative solutions to accessibility problems. But it is so, so, so much better when these people are supported by platform owners rather than having to hack their way in, as the latter further opens the door for exploitation.
I’m in complete agreement with the Weapons of Math Destruction logic - that seems to describe a variant of the traditional neoliberal/new public management-style fallacy of measuring = improvement (I’ll spare you from my stock rant of the perverse incentives inherent to this, the impossibility of measuring most things they claim to measure, etc.). However, I don’t see that as applicable here - the way I see it, this isn’t so much promising a simple way to measure something as it is delimiting things in a way that somewhat removes the need for measurement. It’s not installing speed cameras on a wide, straight road; it’s building a road that affords speeding less easily, by, say, having fewer lanes, more turns, intersections/lights, etc. This obviously doesn’t solve every problem, but it’s a good way of making the problem you’re dealing with a lot more tangible and delimited.
As for your Valorant example: while I agree that it’s pretty absurd that a game will install a rootkit to avoid cheating, if anything this serves as an example of just how extreme measures people producing for-profit cheats and exploits are willing to go to, and the sheer difficulty of combatting them. Is it a heavy-handed solution, and could it likely be solved better? Quite likely. But even in literal-psychopath corporate-land, they wouldn’t do this unless they had some reason to - because doing so is bad PR and costs money. That doesn’t mean it’s the right approach, but it does illustrate the scope of the problem. And further, the dichotomy you end that paragraph on is false. For games like Valorant, the choice isn’t between eliminating cheats v. making games anyone can play - it’s eliminating cheats v. a game so bogged down by cheaters that literally nobody can play it. There are so, so, so many examples of competitive multiplayer games that are completely and utterly broken by cheaters in a way that causes players to abandon them en masse. This is a very real concern. Cheaters literally make games unplayable for everyone.
The question of where to draw the line of which anti-cheat precautions are necessary and what level of accessibility must be sacrificed for this is incredibly ocmplex, and far from a linear relation - but there are always tradeoffs and compromises. Obviously excluding disabled gamers en masse is entirely unacceptable - but so is abandoning the fight against cheaters, as that will exclude everyone from playing. The best way to minimize tradeoffs is generally platform owners being highly involved - though this doesn’t work on open platforms like PC/Windows, as there are no relevant platform control systems there.
And crucially, as I said in the post above, the “MS wants profits from accessories” argument doesn’t add up. Xbox doesn’t make their money from hardware, even licenced accessories. They make their money from games and subscriptions. Their main profit-oriented interest is keeping and growing their subscriber base - for which rooting out cheaters is a core concern. Most likely the potential profits lost due to cheaters far, far outweighs any potential profits gained by expanded accessory licencing.
