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vaguely burnt

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nex3
@nex3

that there is no amount of different color schemes that will make a game accessible to colorblind people. The only consistent solution is to ensure that all relevant gameplay elements can be distinguished by something other than color—pattern, shape, a symbol, an extra border, whatever. If you don't do that, I can't play your game properly.

(This rant brought to you by God of War: Ragnarok, which features color-coded circles for dangerous attacks. Red is unblockable/unparryable, yellow will stagger you if you block but is parryable. It would have been so easy to make one of these a hexagon or something but no.)


nex3
@nex3
  • Being able to distinguish two colors when they're next to each other is not a good accessibility test. In a video game, these colors will appear separately and often on screens with lots of other colors as well. Two colors are only sufficiently different if a player can consistently tell in isolation which one they're looking at.

  • Colorblind people generally have less practice and less skill at distinguishing things by color even if they're colors we can see. Color has always been an unreliable indicator for us, so we tend to default to tracking things other ways. Even if colors are distinguishable in theory, relying on that is harder in practice.

  • Fully colorblind people just don't have that broad a range of colors they can distinguish in isolation, especially in games where the brightness of the screen as a whole changes frequently. Try playing a game in full black and white and see how many different colors you can reliably tell apart.


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in reply to @nex3's post:

FFXIV has had... mixed results with this. On the one hand, you have color-based mechanics where things are distinguished by symbols. For example, a mechanic with blue, orange, purple, and green icons that's also distinguishable by alpha, beta, gamma and delta respectively. On the other hand, they slip when things are just for aesthetics and not tied to a mechanic, particularly when they put orange aoes on an orange floor

This is insightful to hear - I've tried used 'accessible palettes' (e.g. https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/) and tweaked colors under colorblind filters, hoping it would solve this issue, but never had confirmation whether those techniques actually work. Good to know it does not! From what I gather, to make a game truly colorblind friendly, you kind of have to design it that way from the very beginning, not just tweak stuff at the end or after people complain. Which is where most (non-colorblind) devs seem to wind up. Hence the lazy non-solutions like palette swaps.

Typically when I see "colorblind palettes" they still end up having colors I struggle to distinguish, and I'm not even that severely colorblind. If a palette is 100% the only option, the best way to do it is to provide a full RGB color picker for each color. But patterns, shapes, and symbols is a far preferable solution.

That makes sense. I'm not even colorblind and I have trouble distinguishing colors in colorblind palettes sometimes too (especially in gameplay scenarios). There's a big difference between what's possible to distinguish, and what's natural, comfortable, and actually pleasant to distinguish, which is what you need in games, yeah. Thanks for the additional info.

in reply to @nex3's post:

I have full color vision, and I can confirm that these definitely weren't obvious to me, though I had suspected that the automatic colorblind palette adjustment options in most games probably weren't very good at ensuring things were distinguishable. (I've tried those options before to see how games implemented them, and found it hard to distinguish things since the visible color space representable on the screen was reduced by 33% or so, while the number of on-screen colors remained the same)

......It feels really silly to me that that'd be a part of the accessibility options in God of War that they touted so hard about??? I mean, presumably it helps folks who aren't colorblind, and that's probably its intention, but then, what the hell??? It seems like really crummy inclusivity at that point, maybe. (Although, I suppose that's not even an accessibility feature??? I assume it's just like Sekiro's Perilous Attacks, where it's just..... a plain indicator (Sekiro using body language as its actual indicator is probably cooler though.))