Video games are for everyone, and they can
even be enjoyed by those who live with disabilities if game developers make certain design decisions,
or introduce certain options. In this series of videos, I’m looking at how to implement
some of the most popular and easy options to make games better for those with auditory,
visual, motor, or cognitive disabilities. In this second episode of the show, I’m looking at
options for those living with visual impairments such as colourblindness, and low vision. Part 1 - Colourblindness In Cuphead, it’s easy to tell the difference
between these pink punches (which you can parry), and the blue ones, (which you can’t).
Unless, the game looked liked this. And when hacking cameras and whatnot in Bioshock
2, you shouldn’t have a problem differentiating between green cells, which give you access,
and red cells, which trigger an alarm. Unless, the game looked like this. This is what playing games can be like for
those who have colour vision deficiency - more commonly known as being colourblind. That’s
when one or more of the receptors in your eyes is defective, which can reduce your ability
to see a particular chunk of the colour spectrum and make it difficult to tell the difference
between some hues. There are three major types of colour blindness: Deuteranopia, which effects the perception
of green tones, is the most common form. Protanopia is less common, and affects red tones. In practice, these two forms of colourblindness
look quite similar, and are sometimes referred to together as red-green colourblindness. And then there’s tritanopia which is very
rare, and affects your ability to see yellow and, to a lesser extent, blue. We use the suffix “anopia” when the cone
is completely missing, and the suffix “anomaly” when the cone is defective. There’s also
the ultra rare achromatopsia, where you literally see the world in black and white. And colour
vision deficiency can result from physical or neurological damage, which can lead to
very unique effects. Colourblindness affects approximately 1 in
12 men, and 1 in 200 women. Developers can check to see if their games
are readable by those who are colourblind by checking with colourblind gamers, or using
free filter tools to simulate what their game might look like to people with the three major
vision deficiencies. A tool like Color Oracle allows you to see
static images in a simulated colourblind mode, while the program Sim Daltonism can show you
the world through colourblind eyes, in real time. There are also filters for game engines
like Unreal Engine, which is available by default, and Unity, which I’ll link to in
the description. Then, once the filters are applied, developers
should see if critical information like HUD elements, alerts, enemy differences, crosshairs,
explosive barrels, loot rarity, damage indicators, or waypoints are lost or difficult to distinguish. And so, if you’ve run the filter and realised
that colourblind gamers won’t be able to see their red laser sight against different
backgrounds, or tell the difference between the red team and the green team, or pick out
the gold loot from the green loop, what do you do? The best solution is to design around this
issue, and simply avoid relying on colour alone when communicating information, or
distinguishing between two different things. Designers should try to use shapes, symbols, shading, animation, and other visual tricks to make critical parts of the game stand out from one another. Take, for example, Recore: a shooter with
colour-coded enemies and weapons, where you’ll need to use red bullets on red enemies - and
so on. Developer Armature Studio wisely decided to not just use colours, but also put high
contrast white arrows on the enemy’s health bar - left for blue, up for yellow, and right
for red - which corresponds to the d-pad direction you must press to change to the same-coloured
bullets. If you don’t want to make these symbols
appear for everyone, you can have them as part of an optional colourblind mode. A great
example of this is the charming colour-swapping puzzler Hue, where a colourblind mode applies
symbols to the different colours to make them visually distinct from one another. And in Chromagun, which has to deal with lots
of colours and colour combinations, a really clever symbol system is used. So there’s
a unique symbol for the base colours - a vertical line for yellow, a horizontal line for blue,
and a circle for red. And then these symbols can combine to make the mixtures of orange,
purple, and green - and a final one for black. That means you can play the game fully, no
matter what colours you can and can’t see. Where it’s not possible to design around
this issue, the next best step is to allow players to customise the colours they see
on screen. The gold standard is Battlefield 1. Here,
the squad and enemy colours - that pesky red and green again - are hard to distinguish
for players with deuteranopia. And the squad and team colours - green and blue - merge
together for those with tritanopia. So DICE provides a colourblind option that lets you
swap those four colours for a palette that will be more distinguishable for those with
different forms of CVD. Bonus points for showing the change on the
options screen itself, and mega bonus points for letting players simply pick four colours
of their own choosing from a Photoshop-like colour picker. Slightly more simple, one-size-fits-all options
can be found in Far Cry 5, which changes red elements to yellow. And in the Call of Duty
games, where a colourblind option swaps the classic green and red labels, for team members
and enemies, to blue and yellow ones. Here’s another good example, from the puzzle
game The Spectrum Retreat, which has four different coloured blocks to play with. In
this game, a colour vision mode has a different colour palette for deuteranopia or protanopia,
another for tritanopia, and a black and white one that will work with achromatopsia and other
rare vision deficiencies, If you’re looking for a good colour palette
for a colourblind mode, use blue and orange as your primary colours when contrasting key
elements - these will stick out from one another for gamers with all three major types of CVD.
Beyond that, very light and dark colours will also show up, as those with colourblindness
can still see differences in brightness, provided the difference is strong enough. And, of course,
black and white are visible to everyone. Now, some developers seem to think that the
best solution is to provide a filter that will try to recolour the entire screen. But
this is tricky to get right, and rarely the best approach. Overwatch, for example, has
these filters that completely recolour the game and while some players do appreciate
these filters - for many, they don’t really help, and just end up making the game look
utterly bonkers. These settings
shouldn’t mean you experience colours in games differently than you perceive them naturally
in the real world. Instead, they should simply help players to clearly see vital bits of
information. At least its better than Doom, which somehow
managed to include a filter that actually simulates the effects of being colourblind,
rather than help them. Chuck on deutronopia mode, for example, and it just… shows you
what the game would look like if you had that form of colourblindness. How this ended up
in the final game is beyond me. And finally, for games where colour combinations
keep changing - like the ultra colourful Splatoon - it’s good to offer an option that will
lock team colours to something universally distinguishable - in this case light orange
and dark blue - so players will never come across a colour combination they can’t see.
This doesn’t affect all players, as the colours are only locked on the console of
the player who chose the option. Part Two - Low Vision When God of War came out on PS4 this year,
many players struggled to enjoy the game for one, significant reason: the text size was
tiny. Anyone with low vision - or just those who are trying to play the game on a smaller
TV - would struggle to read the game’s subtitles and menus. Thankfully, Sony Santa Monica updated the
game, and included a slider that lets you change the text size. It’s still pretty
small, but it’s something. And it's a good reminder that games can do better
to help players see critical information. Because there are a huge range of conditions
that can reduce your your field of vision, meaning how much you can see, and acuity,
meaning how clearly you can see it. But designers can work to help those players with design
considerations that generally come down to two core things: size and contrast. So, devs should make text, user interface
elements, button prompts and alerts big and easy to read. As a rough guide for console
games, you should not drop below 28 pixel fonts on any UI text, and nothing below 46
pixels for subtitles. Plus, developers should try to make them contrast against different
backgrounds by using dark shadows or outlines. Don’t fall into the trap of only ever testing
your game from a computer on your desk - see what it looks like on a TV on the other side
of the room. If you don’t want to do it by default, then
at least consider adding in an option. In Monster Hunter World, there’s an option
that will boost the size of text on the interface and tutorial. In Borderlands The Presequel,
you can boost the size of the whole user interface to make things like your health and ammo easier
to see. And in Assassin’s Creed Origins, there’s an option to add a black box behind
the subtitle text to make it easier to see them against the game. One more thing to consider is the use of clear,
easy-to-read fonts. Sci-fi screen text or gothic letterpress or handwritten scribbles
might fit the game world, but they can be a nightmare to read with low vision, or from
a distance. You don’t need to take the personality out of your game, though: simply give players
the ability to read the on-screen text in a standard, sans serif font - like in The
Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit. Another option that benefits players with
low vision, is some form of high contrast mode that makes critical parts of the game
better stand out against the background. Take Street Fighter IV, where the animated backgrounds
might be beautiful and atmospheric - but they can also make it hard to see the actual fighters.
A graphical option replaces these backgrounds with a simple black room, making Ryu and chums
easily visible to all. Meanwhile, an indie shmup, Shoot 1UP, lets
you choose the opacity of the background layer. Drop it down to low, and the unimportant backdrop
gets darker - causing enemy ships and bullets to stick out like a sore thumb. For some games
this can be a really easy option to implement, because it’s just a black rectangle between
foreground and background. It’s also important for a game to have a
really vivid soundscape, so that critical information can be picked up by those with
low vision. It’s easy to know that you’ve killed a Combine soldier in Half Life 2, for
example, because they play a loud flatlining sound when they die. In fact, some games can even be played by
gamers who are completely blind, if the soundscape is detailed and covers all important information. Fighting games are a good example of this.
Their simple environment, combined with great sound design, mean they’re often accessible
by default. But some extra considerations are needed. For example, NetherRealms’s fighting games
Injustice and Mortal Kombat X have interactable stage elements, and - at the launch of Injustice
- the only way to know that you can use them is to look out for a white visual cue. But after receiving feedback from blind players,
the devs added an accessibility option that plays a pulsing sound effect if a player is
near one of these interactables. The sound plays in the left ear of your headphones if
you’re stood in front of it, or in the right ear if your opponent is. Now, blind gamers
can even compete in tournaments. Another blind gamer, SightlessKombat, asked the devs of Killer Instinct to add audio cues to correspond with HUD elements like the knockdown
value meter and the shadow meter - so he knows when combos are about to drop, and when special
attacks are ready for use. Those sounds are now in the game, and there’s a menu option
that lets you change the volume of those sounds. Because, like in the audio episode, games should
let you change the volume of different audio sources so players can dip or mute the music
to better focus on critical sound effects. You can also support screenreaders, which
are external pieces of software that can read out text from a game. The fighting game Skullgirls,
for example, is configured to work with screenreaders, and it will read out menu text to low sighted
players. This would make lots of sense for interface-driven games like Hearthstone, or
text-heavy games like visual novels that don’t have voice acting. I’ve put some links in
the description to some handy resources, if you want to consider this option. Ultimately, video games are a massively visual
medium - which means disabilities that affect your vision will undoubtedly affect your ability
to play. But smart design choices and handy options will make most games way more accessible
to those who are colourblind, or live with low vision. Just remember: don’t rely on colour alone,
focus on size and contrast, and invest in good audio. Beyond that, make sure you test
your games for this stuff - either by working with players with disabilities, or simply
playing your game on a TV that’s across the room, or by using colourblind filters. Do that and not only will your game be more
accessible - but also help out players who are playing on a smaller screen, or squinting
to see their TV in a sunny room, or playing on a phone in battery saving mode, and so
on. As with all accessibility measures, pretty much everyone will benefit from a little extra
work. Thanks for watching! Huge thanks this week
to accessibility specialist Ian Hamilton, of the Game Accessibility Guidelines, who
provided loads of help. Plus, a team of colourblind gamers on Twitter who shared their experiences
with me. Future episodes will cover motor disabilities,
as well as cognitive disabilities like simulation sickness, epilepsy, and dyslexia. GMTK and
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