A player with two thumbs on one hand ran into an accessibility issue with their Steam Deck, so the Reddit community came to the rescue

Reddit is definitely a special place on the internet. It’s somewhere you can share your thoughts, post something interesting or something you’re really proud of, or just ask that one question that’s been bugging you for a while now. Ideally, everyone would treat each other with respect, but it is what it is. Still, a lot of the time, when people ask for help, they actually get it.

When Reddit works like it should

Reddit user Alpha-Quartz recently took to the SteamDeck subreddit to talk about a problem they’ve been having with their new toy:

And let’s just say people jumped in to help – well, not everyone, since the post ended up getting locked thanks to a few unhelpful comments. Either way, the whole thing totally blew up over the past couple of days.

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Some people suggested using a joystick extender, but those mostly help with raising the sticks, not really with moving them side to side, so that didn’t solve the problem. There were a few other attachments mentioned too, but none of them really fit the situation.

Another idea was to remap the trackpad to act like a thumbstick in the controller settings but that’s already been tested, and it didn’t work all that well. One person even suggested just using a different gamepad entirely, but that’s more of a temporary workaround than an actual solution.

Source: Reddit

So the real answer (and probably the simplest one) came from someone in the comments who designed a custom 3D-printed extension. The model still needs a bit of fine-tuning, but it looks like what Alpha-Quartz had in mind. The fact that it was whipped up in under two days is impressive. It’s one of those wholesome moments that reminds you why communities like this are amazing.

There are places where you can find lots of helpful gadgets for accessibility, but the challenges people face are often very individual. So, as always, Reddit turned out to be the perfect space to find a solution – even with all the toxic behavior going on there.

• Reddit
• consoles
• Steam Deck