Could Mouse Joycons be a Switch 2 Accessibility Feature?

A little over 24 hours ago, Nintendo finally revealed the Switch 2 to the world. After months of hardware leaks ranging from photos of the motherboard to images of dev kit controllers, the new handheld hybrid system was showcased to the world in a brief hardware focused two minute trailer, with promises of a more in depth reveal coming in April.

Much of the initial reveal trailer detailed incremental upgrades to the system’s design – New magnetically attaching Joycons, a larger screen, a new U shaped kickstand, a second USB-C port on the top of the system for tabletop mode charging, and a mysterious new button on the right Joycon not labelled in the trailer, but with a letter C present on it in leaked versions of the device.

However, there is one aspect of the Switch 2 hinted at in the initial reveal trailer I want to speculate on, because it could potentially offer a solution to a major accessibility barrier present with the current generation of Switch systems.

Let’s talk about the potential of using the new Switch 2 Joycons on their side like a mouse on PC.

Now, to be clear, this is far from an officially confirmed feature that I’m going to discuss. This is speculation based in part on rumours prior to the official system reveal trailer, and partly on things seen in the official video yesterday.

So, at times during the Switch 2 reveal, you can see that on both the left and right Joycon, there appears to be a pair of optical sensors in a small housing along the rail edge of the new controllers. These appear, as best we can tell, to be short range optical sensors similar to the kind seen in most modern PC mice.

Now we don’t have official confirmation of this, but speculation is high that these will be used for their most obvious possible purpose, to allow Switch 2 Joycons to be placed on their side, rail touching a table or other flat surface, to function as a mouse and control a pointer on screen.

When rumours about this first surfaced online a few weeks ago, I was a little sceptical. The thing is, like many people hearing that idea for the first time, I instantly went and tried turning one of my Gen 1 Joycon on its side, and it already feels surprisingly comfortable to use like a mouse. The bumper and trigger buttons acting as left and right mouse buttons, thumb on the analogue stick or face buttons, it feels pretty obvious that something like this could be a viable control scheme.

This theory seems to be supported by the initial reveal trailer which, while not definitively confirming the feature, showcases both Joycon placed on their sides on a flat surface, gliding around as though being used as mice.

This is further supported by the fact that this sequence of the trailer begins with a super quick shot of the Joycon being connected to their new wrist strap peripherals. Now, why would you want to attach wrist strap connectors during a segment of the trailer about placing your Joycons on a flat surface to glide around? Well, the new wrist strap connectors raise your Joycon rail slightly up off of the table or other surface, and feature a flat raised side seemingly designed to improve the ability to glide the Joycon around, and slightly lift the optical sensor slightly away from the surface it’s detecting, offering a small hole where the sensor lies.

So, while not formally confirmed, I’m going to for the time being assume this is what Nintendo is hinting at with this part of their reveal trailer – The Switch 2 Joycons can be placed on their side and used as an optical mouse as part of optional controller setups for games on their new hardware.

So, what does that mean in practice? Well, there’s a few obvious genres that this kind of control scheme might make more comfortable to play on a console. Metroid Prime 4 launching on Switch 2 could perhaps offer mouse controls for first person shooter aiming. A new Mario Maker could use mouse controls to allow for more comfortable level design while docked. Animal Crossing could use mouse controls to more efficiently manage landscaping and home design tasks. Future Real Time Strategy games on the system could be made more playable, alongside point and click adventure titles.

However, I want to focus today on something a little more hypothetical – A potential way that offering players mouse controls could help work around an accessibility barrier present with the current generation Switch – Mandatory motion controls.

It’s no secret that the current Switch has a handful of games, some of which are first party titles, that feature mandatory motion controls when docked. Examples of this stretch back basically as far as the system itself, with games like Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee making motion controls mandatory for Pokéball throwing when docked, even when an alternative control scheme not involving motion exists for handheld mode.

Now, in a perfect world game designers would avoid making motion controls mandatory in their games where possible, to reduce the risk of accessibility barriers for disabled gamers who may struggle to make rapid, sweeping, or precise motions with their arms during gameplay. However, we’ve been asking for developers to avoid mandatory motion in their games for a while now, and it doesn’t seem like that’s a battle that’s going to be instantly won.

However, I wonder, would it be possible for game developers to offer alternative control schemes on Switch 2 for their games, where motion controls are instead replaced with mouse controls?

Imagine a game like Skyward Sword HD. That game thankfully did provide alternative controls to avoid motion, allowing players to use the right analogue stick to swing their sword at the cost of losing 3D camera control (unless they held down an extra button). Imagine now a Switch 2 update for the game that allowed players to crank up the sensitivity on their Switch 2 Joycon mouse, and swing their sword with a small mouse movement in the direction they wished to slash. They could even still hypothetically move the camera without having to hold a button down, using the “mouse” Joycon’s analogue stick with their thumb.

While switching motion controls for mouse inputs isn’t going to make motion centric games accessible for every kind of disabled gamer who currently struggles with motion inputs, it would likely help a lot of people, and a lot of use cases. It’s not going to help those for whom fine motor control is their biggest issue, but for someone who struggles with pain or fatigue when doing large sweeping repetitive motions with their arms, small wrist movements might be less painful or exhausting, for example.

Now, I recogise not all motion controlled games are as immediately easy to map to equivalent mouse controls as the example I gave with Skyward Sword. But, I do think that for games designed to centre motion controls, this could be a way to offer players an alternative that might be, hypothetiocally, more accessible for them due to stressing different muscles, movements, and parts of the body.

I recognise that the Switch 2 Joycons being used as mice isn’t officially confirmed at present, and much of this is speculation, but I do believe that there is some real potential to help work around motion controls if this is an available option on Nintendo’s new system, and I really hope we see some confirmation during the company’s April Switch 2 Direct presentation that will confirm this feature.

I think there’s potential for something revolutionary here. For the first time in a little while, a Nintendo controller gimmick actually makes me feel hopeful that it might have new accessibility potential worth exploring.