4 ms·

Color blind gamer (2008)

59 points by Serow225 12y ago

lettergram 12y ago
This article is over five years old
- drdaeman 12y ago
  And is still relevant.
- Red-Shift 12y ago
  I'm still colorblind.
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  It turns out that human biology does not operate on a two-year upgrade cycle.
DonHopkins 12y ago
I was visiting Ocean Quigley at Maxis, the lead artist on SimCity (and many other Maxis games), and he gave me a demo of a video filter feature in SimCity that would adjust the colors so you could play the game with various sorts of color blindness. Not only that, but it also had an "empathy filter" that would adjust the colors so people with normal color vision could see what it looked like to people with various forms of color blindness. I think that's an excellent accessibility feature, which should be built into the operating system or video driver, so you can apply it to all games and applications. Not only are the filters to adjust the colors for color blind people useful, but also the empathy filters are useful for developers and designers who want to test their applications and designs to make sure they're usable by color blind people. http://www.oceanquigley.com/ http://www.oceanquigley.com/ http://oceanquigley.blogspot.nl/ http://oceanquigley.blogspot.nl/
- Serow225 12y ago
  There are also simulators for low visual acuity that can help with web design work, such as this one for Chrome: http://accessgarage.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/458/ http://accessgarage.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/458/
  - gknoy 12y ago
    That sounds like a REALLY cool plugin. Unfortunately, when I try to install it, I get an error ("Package is invalid. Details: 'Could not load javascript 'contentScript.js' for content script.'.").
- brianmcc 12y ago
  OS integration would be amazing, could make a massive difference. I reckon any developer - or document writer for that matter, given word processors' long established support for colour - shown a "here's what I see" would immediately gain a better understanding of the challenges we colour-impaired folks face. (RAG ratings, red/amber/green, in the business world are a real pain)
  - DonHopkins 12y ago
    I'm not color blind myself (but I'm supportive ;), and I don't know much about how it works. So I wonder if for any given kind (or instance) of color blindness, if there is a single (or multiple) color mappings that would make all colors distinguishable (enough), or if it would be better to be able to adjust the color mappings on an application-by-application basis? For example, you might want to use a different color mapping for Flower than for Doom. This seems like something Apple should do, since they're so good at accessibility, and they used to have a very colorful logo, but something happened to it over the years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game)
    - brianmcc 12y ago
      Some sort of colour swap could indeed be helpful, an interesting idea. In my own personal experience, though, whole ranges of colours can be confusing - for me, red, orange, green, brown can all together be problematic. And more so in some shades than others. Different colour blind people experience difference types and severities. I think we are talking about two - both good - ideas. I was thinking a "show people with working vision what stuff looks like to the colour deficient" - e.g. toggled by the press of a button. Sounds like you're thinking of a "colour management thing to help colour blind people actively change their experience". That too could be awesome, although one down side is possibly: for all that my vision is deficient, it's normal now to me, and any permanent screen filter would be very strange to work with. As far as games go, the best mechanism seems one which requires no colour vision at all: i.e. if you can still play it in black and white (TV / monitor settings), then it's 100% friendly to the colour blind. Things like textures, symbols, shapes, contrast, and blinking can all be useful when done judiciously. Of course - colour blindness is not the same as no-colour-perception. Explaining to friends and family that I don't see black and white has been a theme for me for 30+ years now :-)
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  Hmm. I don't know much about video coding, but the authors of f.lux (https://justgetflux.com/ https://justgetflux.com/) managed to hook into Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS video drivers to adjust the shading of all onscreen pixels, and I've never had a single hiccup with the versions I use (Windows and Mac). That might be a good place to start. Think I'll drop them a line...
- aw3c2 12y ago
  Unreal Engine 4 has filters built-in. There are also monitors that allow simulation directly on the "hardware side". And for Gnome or some of the fancy rotating Ubuntu workspace thingies there was some plugin once but I never got it to work.
ajanuary 12y ago
Puzzle Bobble does have symbols for different colours, just like Peggle. I guess they're too difficult to see?
- RobotCaleb 12y ago
  (Article author here) You know, I've never noticed that. Looking at it again I see that you're right. I believe, however, that the gameplay tends to be too fast to do proper pattern matching. Something, anyway, since I failed to ever notice the patterns.
vanderZwan 12y ago
So I've been following the development of Cogmind, a Roguelike in which you play a robot. It seems like it will do an amazing job of pushing ASCII graphics to its limits and combining a traditional Roguelike with more modern user interface idioms. Anyway, being a robot, and old-school ASCII, retro-green colours are to be expected. So I remarked on his TIGsource devlog that I was colourblind. Then the Kyzrati, the sole developer, does this: http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/04/accommodating-colorblindness/ http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/04/accommodating-colo... And that is why indy-developers are awesome.
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  Dang it, I just came here to post the same thing!
olgstein 12y ago
Not for game, but I am colorblind and I have made this html5 utility for maps and charts : http://colorblindhelper.com/ http://colorblindhelper.com/ If it can help someone!
RobotCaleb 12y ago
I wrote this several years ago. I still work with developers when I can to help bring their games into better shape for color blind gamers. I recently worked with the developer of 2x0ng [0] to create a color blind mode for his fun game. It started with solid blocks of color [1] and ended up with patterned blocks of color [2] that resulted in the game being playable by color blind individuals. [0] - http://blocky.io/2x0ng.html http://blocky.io/2x0ng.html [1] - http://media.desura.com/cache/images/games/1/22/21729/thumb_940x3000/Screenshot-Blocky-7.png http://media.desura.com/cache/images/games/1/22/21729/thumb_... [2] - http://imgur.com/a/098zC http://imgur.com/a/098zC
terhechte 12y ago
Not only games, but also graphs/charts. I'm colorblind and I can't remember how often I had to understand a graph where the lines were in red, green, yellow and / or orange. And the specific colors were chosen so that they - to me - pretty much all look alike. Then I have a look at the legend and can't figure out which is which and the whole point of the chart is lost on me. Example: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/TopTenWikipediasGraph.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/TopTenWik... Hard for me to distinguish en/de/pl and ja/it and nl/pt.
eggbrain 12y ago
I never knew I was colorblind (red/green) until I was in high school -- we were looking at Ishihara plates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishihara_Test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishihara_Test) in class and I told the teacher there must be something wrong because I couldn't see what we were supposed to see. I thought I had gotten a bad photocopy, because I couldn't believe I had gone through life not noticing that I was colorblind. As I've aged I start to notice it everywhere though -- video games, greeting cards (hello Christmas colors), and websites alike. Just yesterday, in fact, I was reminded when I checked the reservation status for my ZipCar -- it looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/OkC2dG0.png http://i.imgur.com/OkC2dG0.png. I decided to tweet them and give them a suggestion of how to fix it (my idea: http://i.imgur.com/nNVUXLO.png http://i.imgur.com/nNVUXLO.png), but in general it surprises me how infrequently designers/developers will think about a large portion of the population (8-10% of males) when they sometimes will spend days making sure IE8 or other browsers with increasingly smaller marketshare look great.
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  Wow that ZipCar reservation was very blurry -- it looks just like what I see when I take off my glasses! I might be color blind too! ;)
- r00fus 12y ago
  One of the biggest things I took from making my web front-ends section 508 compliant is to ensure that any icon doesn't use color alone to convey information. I also take this into practice when doing presentations, as one of my PMs was R/G color blind (we decided to include a letter to indicate G/Y/R status in addition to the color). What's amazing is how many interfaces in real life still fails at a level where even a non-color-blind person like me can see it on a daily basis.
beaverfox 12y ago
Forgive me if this is an obvious question, but why have a colorblind mode in a game at all? Why not just design the game UI so that it works for everyone? For example, in Left 4 Dead, why not just use the white crosshair with black background all the time? Having an additional mode to a game is another thing to test, and in this case I don't see the benefit of keeping it separate.
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  Most likely, the developer feels that the "standard" mode is more aesthetically pleasing for non-colorblind folks, and wants to accommodate the colorblind without compromising the overall vision. I'm inclined to agree about the specific example of the L4D crosshairs, though.
- brianmcc 12y ago
  Agreed - one design that works for everyone would be best. All it takes is a little up front awareness and I don't think there's all that much aesthetic compromise to pay.

59 points by Serow225 12y ago

lettergram 12y ago

This article is over five years old

drdaeman 12y ago
And is still relevant.
Red-Shift 12y ago
I'm still colorblind.
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
It turns out that human biology does not operate on a two-year upgrade cycle.

DonHopkins 12y ago

I was visiting Ocean Quigley at Maxis, the lead artist on SimCity (and many other Maxis games), and he gave me a demo of a video filter feature in SimCity that would adjust the colors so you could play the game with various sorts of color blindness. Not only that, but it also had an "empathy filter" that would adjust the colors so people with normal color vision could see what it looked like to people with various forms of color blindness. I think that's an excellent accessibility feature, which should be built into the operating system or video driver, so you can apply it to all games and applications. Not only are the filters to adjust the colors for color blind people useful, but also the empathy filters are useful for developers and designers who want to test their applications and designs to make sure they're usable by color blind people. http://www.oceanquigley.com/ http://www.oceanquigley.com/ http://oceanquigley.blogspot.nl/ http://oceanquigley.blogspot.nl/

Serow225 12y ago
There are also simulators for low visual acuity that can help with web design work, such as this one for Chrome: http://accessgarage.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/458/ http://accessgarage.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/458/
- gknoy 12y ago
  That sounds like a REALLY cool plugin. Unfortunately, when I try to install it, I get an error ("Package is invalid. Details: 'Could not load javascript 'contentScript.js' for content script.'.").
brianmcc 12y ago
OS integration would be amazing, could make a massive difference. I reckon any developer - or document writer for that matter, given word processors' long established support for colour - shown a "here's what I see" would immediately gain a better understanding of the challenges we colour-impaired folks face. (RAG ratings, red/amber/green, in the business world are a real pain)
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  I'm not color blind myself (but I'm supportive ;), and I don't know much about how it works. So I wonder if for any given kind (or instance) of color blindness, if there is a single (or multiple) color mappings that would make all colors distinguishable (enough), or if it would be better to be able to adjust the color mappings on an application-by-application basis? For example, you might want to use a different color mapping for Flower than for Doom. This seems like something Apple should do, since they're so good at accessibility, and they used to have a very colorful logo, but something happened to it over the years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game)
  - brianmcc 12y ago
    Some sort of colour swap could indeed be helpful, an interesting idea. In my own personal experience, though, whole ranges of colours can be confusing - for me, red, orange, green, brown can all together be problematic. And more so in some shades than others. Different colour blind people experience difference types and severities. I think we are talking about two - both good - ideas. I was thinking a "show people with working vision what stuff looks like to the colour deficient" - e.g. toggled by the press of a button. Sounds like you're thinking of a "colour management thing to help colour blind people actively change their experience". That too could be awesome, although one down side is possibly: for all that my vision is deficient, it's normal now to me, and any permanent screen filter would be very strange to work with. As far as games go, the best mechanism seems one which requires no colour vision at all: i.e. if you can still play it in black and white (TV / monitor settings), then it's 100% friendly to the colour blind. Things like textures, symbols, shapes, contrast, and blinking can all be useful when done judiciously. Of course - colour blindness is not the same as no-colour-perception. Explaining to friends and family that I don't see black and white has been a theme for me for 30+ years now :-)
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
Hmm. I don't know much about video coding, but the authors of f.lux (https://justgetflux.com/ https://justgetflux.com/) managed to hook into Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS video drivers to adjust the shading of all onscreen pixels, and I've never had a single hiccup with the versions I use (Windows and Mac). That might be a good place to start. Think I'll drop them a line...
aw3c2 12y ago
Unreal Engine 4 has filters built-in. There are also monitors that allow simulation directly on the "hardware side". And for Gnome or some of the fancy rotating Ubuntu workspace thingies there was some plugin once but I never got it to work.

ajanuary 12y ago

Puzzle Bobble does have symbols for different colours, just like Peggle. I guess they're too difficult to see?

RobotCaleb 12y ago
(Article author here) You know, I've never noticed that. Looking at it again I see that you're right. I believe, however, that the gameplay tends to be too fast to do proper pattern matching. Something, anyway, since I failed to ever notice the patterns.

vanderZwan 12y ago

So I've been following the development of Cogmind, a Roguelike in which you play a robot. It seems like it will do an amazing job of pushing ASCII graphics to its limits and combining a traditional Roguelike with more modern user interface idioms. Anyway, being a robot, and old-school ASCII, retro-green colours are to be expected. So I remarked on his TIGsource devlog that I was colourblind. Then the Kyzrati, the sole developer, does this: http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/04/accommodating-colorblindness/ http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/04/accommodating-colo... And that is why indy-developers are awesome.

PhasmaFelis 12y ago
Dang it, I just came here to post the same thing!

olgstein 12y ago

Not for game, but I am colorblind and I have made this html5 utility for maps and charts : http://colorblindhelper.com/ http://colorblindhelper.com/ If it can help someone!

RobotCaleb 12y ago

I wrote this several years ago. I still work with developers when I can to help bring their games into better shape for color blind gamers. I recently worked with the developer of 2x0ng [0] to create a color blind mode for his fun game. It started with solid blocks of color [1] and ended up with patterned blocks of color [2] that resulted in the game being playable by color blind individuals. [0] - http://blocky.io/2x0ng.html http://blocky.io/2x0ng.html [1] - http://media.desura.com/cache/images/games/1/22/21729/thumb_940x3000/Screenshot-Blocky-7.png http://media.desura.com/cache/images/games/1/22/21729/thumb_... [2] - http://imgur.com/a/098zC http://imgur.com/a/098zC

terhechte 12y ago

Not only games, but also graphs/charts. I'm colorblind and I can't remember how often I had to understand a graph where the lines were in red, green, yellow and / or orange. And the specific colors were chosen so that they - to me - pretty much all look alike. Then I have a look at the legend and can't figure out which is which and the whole point of the chart is lost on me. Example: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/TopTenWikipediasGraph.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/TopTenWik... Hard for me to distinguish en/de/pl and ja/it and nl/pt.

eggbrain 12y ago

I never knew I was colorblind (red/green) until I was in high school -- we were looking at Ishihara plates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishihara_Test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishihara_Test) in class and I told the teacher there must be something wrong because I couldn't see what we were supposed to see. I thought I had gotten a bad photocopy, because I couldn't believe I had gone through life not noticing that I was colorblind. As I've aged I start to notice it everywhere though -- video games, greeting cards (hello Christmas colors), and websites alike. Just yesterday, in fact, I was reminded when I checked the reservation status for my ZipCar -- it looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/OkC2dG0.png http://i.imgur.com/OkC2dG0.png. I decided to tweet them and give them a suggestion of how to fix it (my idea: http://i.imgur.com/nNVUXLO.png http://i.imgur.com/nNVUXLO.png), but in general it surprises me how infrequently designers/developers will think about a large portion of the population (8-10% of males) when they sometimes will spend days making sure IE8 or other browsers with increasingly smaller marketshare look great.

DonHopkins 12y ago
Wow that ZipCar reservation was very blurry -- it looks just like what I see when I take off my glasses! I might be color blind too! ;)
r00fus 12y ago
One of the biggest things I took from making my web front-ends section 508 compliant is to ensure that any icon doesn't use color alone to convey information. I also take this into practice when doing presentations, as one of my PMs was R/G color blind (we decided to include a letter to indicate G/Y/R status in addition to the color). What's amazing is how many interfaces in real life still fails at a level where even a non-color-blind person like me can see it on a daily basis.

beaverfox 12y ago

Forgive me if this is an obvious question, but why have a colorblind mode in a game at all? Why not just design the game UI so that it works for everyone? For example, in Left 4 Dead, why not just use the white crosshair with black background all the time? Having an additional mode to a game is another thing to test, and in this case I don't see the benefit of keeping it separate.

PhasmaFelis 12y ago
Most likely, the developer feels that the "standard" mode is more aesthetically pleasing for non-colorblind folks, and wants to accommodate the colorblind without compromising the overall vision. I'm inclined to agree about the specific example of the L4D crosshairs, though.
brianmcc 12y ago
Agreed - one design that works for everyone would be best. All it takes is a little up front awareness and I don't think there's all that much aesthetic compromise to pay.