In fact, Minor has not only figured out how to play (certain) video games. He’s trying to build a career with a singular goal: to make it so blind people can play any game they want. To the outsider, this sounds nonsensical. The “video” part of “video game” comes from the Latin for “see.” Isn’t it a bit unreasonable, expecting such a visual medium to be made blind-accessible? But Minor is making progress. He’s even becoming something of a celebrity in his field, with some impressive credits to his name: He consulted on Rare’s Sea of Thieves and the Xbox game As Dusk Falls, narrated the audio description track for Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, and is now working on a number of titles from well-known studios whose names I can’t print, due to nondisclosure agreements. Because of people like him, and a handful of sympathetic allies in the industry, there are now more options for blind gamers than ever. Minor devotes most of his time to this work, something that not every blind or disabled person would be able to do. As Minor puts it, he is in a “privileged position”: Back when he was shot by his father, people weren’t quite as desensitized to gun violence, he says, and news about family-annihilation cases wasn’t so routine. People cared more. Local fundraising efforts established a college fund for him, with a small amount for emergencies. Still, he struggles. Being disabled is expensive, and even with his various odd jobs in the video game industry, Minor still relies on survivor benefits, Social Security, and food stamps. In other words, he can barely afford to do this work at all. But he insists that he’s lucky to be able to try. At the pizza place, Minor asks me to read the menu for him. If I wasn’t here, he’d have used an app on his phone that scans text and reads it aloud. It’d probably be faster that way—I’ve heard Minor use the app at other times, and he cranks the speed up so high that my ears only hear a spiky torrent of consonants. He’d have “seen” the whole menu by the time I finished dictating the appetizer section. It later occurs to me that sometimes when Minor asks a sighted person for help, it might actually be for our sake: to let us feel useful and included. One of the first things you’ll notice about Minor is a massive blue Gyarados tattoo on his right arm. It holds a few layers of meaning. Visually, a powerful water beast with wings makes sense for a swimmer. Minor picked up swimming during middle school, and he ended up being so good at it he earned a spot on the US Paralympic team. (When I first met him, in 2020, he was training for the Tokyo Olympics—a trip that never happened because he dropped out after what he describes as a long period of depression.) Photograph: Darrell Jackson Photograph: Darrell Jackson But the tattoo’s bigger meaning is more straightforward: Gyarados is a Pokémon, and the Pokémon video games changed Minor’s life. It began in the hospital, as he recovered. “I still don’t remember the specific day,” he says, setting down a slice of pizza. “It very much feels like a dream. But I remember one of my friends would visit me from school, and I just wanted to talk to him about Pokémon. So he would play his game for me next to the bed, and I would listen, and I realized that sometimes I could tell what was going on.” Pokémon was probably not designed to be blind-friendly. Instead, it’s what might be called “accidentally accessible.” Each Pokémon has a completely unique cry, a noise it makes when it’s summoned for battle. Bird-type Pokémon might have light and airy chiptune glissandos, while heavier rock-type ones tend more toward bass-heavy beeps and booms. Minor had already sunk hours into his own copy of Pokémon Ruby, so he recognized some of the cries from memory.