It's probably just an accident of scheduling, but this deeply affecting documentary is arriving just when there's a debate raging at the school gates about children's use of smartphones and social media. So while it's undoubtedly troubling how tech platforms set out to addict and exploit young minds, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin provides a fascinating counterargument about how online gaming at least can be a lifeline for some individuals who find themselves isolated in the real world, or IRL as the kids like to say. Born in 1989, Mats Steen started out like many other Norwegian children of his generation: energetic, sweet-natured, unusually pale. However, his parents Robert and Trude soon discovered that he had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic condition that eroded his ability to move and breathe and which would eventually kill him at the age of 25. By that point in 2014, Robert, Trude and Mats' sister Mia knew that Mats spent hours of his life online playing World of Warcraft using special equipment to accommodate his disability and had been publishing a blog about his life.

It's also worth noting: "The Last of Us Part II's" engine, built with accessibility in mind, is right there. The engine allowed "Part II" a level of accessibility unprecedented before in triple-A games, with more than 60 different features ranging from motor options to turn melee combos into holds, navigational assistance and high contrast displays, to various vibration settings and input remapping. It was considered a groundbreaking achievement for accessibility in the industry, and many of these options are being carried over into the "The Last of Us Part I" remake. Sony recently announced the full slate of accessibility options on offer in the remake. In that same blog post, the developer called "The Last of Us Part II's" accessibility features a "baseline" on which it built the remake.

The video game "The Last of Us Part II" is already proven to be a hit for the Sony PlayStation 4. But for some gamers, the much-hyped release means more – the cinematic thriller breaks new ground with features that make it easier for disabled players to play along. As video game consoles have evolved, developers have been able to design games that are more accessible."Gears And tech hardware such as Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controller, released in 2018, has also made games easier to play for those with a disability. Game developers have also begun soliciting the advice of disabled gamers to make their titles more accessible for the 46 million or so gamers in the U.S. alone who are disabled, according to researchers at the AbleGamers charity, a non-profit that advocates for and assists gamers who are disabled. "The Last of Us Part II," released last month ($59.99, "I can say they definitely raised the bar," said AbleGamers founder and executive director Mark Barlet. Sony-owned studio that created the game and others such as the Uncharted series, set out to address issues faced by the disabled. In 2016's "Uncharted 4: A Thief's End," the designers made it easier to make moves on a controller for those with motion limitations. A year later, the studio invited disability advocate and game consultant Brandon Cole, who is blind, to speak to developers there as development on "The Last of Us Part II' was beginning.

The Fedex package arrived at Mark Barlet's home in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, on Christmas Eve 2016. He opened the box and gingerly pulled out a sleek black-and-white device with two large buttons: a prototype for the new Xbox Adaptive Controller. He touched the logo and tears came to his eyes. "I couldn't believe it," Barlet tells me. "I said to myself, 'We fucking did it.' Barlet, 44, is a disabled Air Force veteran. He injured his spinal cord in 1996 at Andrews Air Base in Maryland. He can walk, but he suffers from chronic pain. One evening in 2004, he was at home playing the multiplayer game EverQuest II with a friend in Nevada who has MS. "Suddenly, her right hand just stopped working," Barlet recalls. She didn't regain mobility for months. Deeply affected by the experience, Barlet started emailing and calling game companies to ask about modified controllers and other assistive tech. What he learned was discouraging. Few major gaming companies had even considered developing consoles for players with restricted movement. Later that year, Barlet founded AbleGamers, an organization that advocates for accessible gaming options. Disabled gamers are a very real, very vocal demographic: AbleGamers estimates that there are more than 30 million of them in the US. But across all systems, videogame controllers are configured more or less the same: two thumbsticks, a D-pad, and a slew of buttons. Increasingly complex gameplay--think popular shooters like Call of Duty or fast-paced action games like Assassin's Creed--often necessitates rapid- fire button combinations, like tapping one repeatedly while pressing another, or moving both thumbsticks simultaneously. Motion controls, like those required for Nintendo's upcoming Pokémon: Let's Go games, are another challenge altogether. For years, the disabled gamer community has compensated with switches: devices that allow people with limited mobility to control a game using different parts of their body, like their head, foot, or mouth. But switches, typically made by medical supply companies, can be expensive--up to $200 apiece--and clunky. "A lot of them are comically large or look like a medical device," says Erin Muston-Firsch, an occupational therapist who helps patients with spinal cord and brain injuries at Craig Hospital's Tech Lab in Colorado. Other times, players make do however they can. Michael Phillip Begum is a 30-year-old gamer in Brownsville, Texas. He has a condition that prevents his muscles from growing, hindering physical activity. But for seven years he's been playing Street Fighter competitively under the name Brolylegs, moving a standard controller using his cheeks and tongue. Until the rise of social media, developers were clueless about how gamers with disabilities struggled, he says. "It was simply a choice we had to make.

More than 33 million people in North America play videogames with some kind of disability, ranging from colorblindness to missing limbs, according to AbleGamers, a nonprofit that pushes for more accessibility in the videogame industry. "Social media has made a huge impact on being able to spread awareness of our mission and to gain support," said Craig Kaufman, program director at AbleGamers, which worked with Microsoft on developing its specialized controller. Even so, accommodations for disabled gamers still aren't yet the norm, according to Ian Hamilton, an independent consultant who specializes in helping developers make games more inclusive. For such folks, "buying games can often be a lottery," he said. In recent years, game companies increasingly have added accessibility features, such as letting players remap buttons on controllers to suit their needs. In some games, it is possible for visually impaired players to alter the colors of characters, or for those who can't hear on-screen dialogue to turn on subtitles.

BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat's Gaming Reporter Steffan Powell has been given exclusive access to the new device and met some of those it's designed to help.