Please make the game friendly to the 5-10% with colorblindness

First off, most 'color blind' people are in fact color deficient, so they don't see in black and white, they just see differently. Somewhere around 8-10% of males are red-green color deficient. http://www.colour-blindness.com/general/prevalence/ Some people with it might not realize they have it. http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/Ishihara.asp I can only see the 25 clearly on that page, 56 if I look for a second or two, the rest don't show up as numbers at all to me as I'm red-green color blind just like around 8-10% of the male population. There is no treatment or cure for this condition, our eyes are just different. Note we CAN see red and green, they're just DIFFERENT.

The biggest thing this does is make red and green not stand from one another and red is always a dull color. A red name over an NPCs head over green grass might as well be two shades of gray. Red text doesn't stand out from black text on a white background. Red text over any dark background is hard to read. Sometimes I can make this stuff out but I have to stare at it for several seconds. Green and yellow can be confused as well depending on the shade chosen as the red component is often lost. Turn the red component of your monitor down to 30-40% of the other colors and that's about what I see.

So, what would I have the designers do differently? Here are some guidelines:

1) When possible, use orange instead of red to indicate danger or other urgent information. This includes text and graphical effects like AoE indicators.

2) Add in redundant non-color based indicators of quality, difficulty, etc. levels.

3) Add a contrasting border around things, black and white if possible.

4) Let me pick the color! For warning text, unit names, borders, HUD elements and the like.

These issues crop up for me in a lot of games to varying degrees, hopefully with a little awareness up front this one will be one of the better ones. Thanks!

 

I'm not color blind. I want nothing but fairness. Let us choose warning colors pls.

 

Maybe they can have a "COLOR BLIND" option in the options menu, would that be enough? I would like to have the reds and greens in the game as much as possible.

Most games (UO included) allows for you to change the colors of good and combative creatures to whatever you want. So I doubt you will have to worry.

 

Great post! Are there any games out there which have handled this really well?

And if you're in the Alpha / Beta test pool, I'm sure they would welcome any feedback you can give them regarding this to make the game even better for as many people out there as they can!

 

I have a completely different type of colorblindness where green looks either blue, grey, or brown to me. I have a similar issue with yellow. While I probably won't need to change any settings, if you do have a color blind mode, make the colors user selectable.

While I have no problem distinguishing red from other colors, it's probably the worst color as far as readability.

 

You can put most of this in a color blind mode in the settings as long as you get it in there so it CAN be turned on or customized. The key is getting the devs thinking about this early, so they're putting in a variable "WarningColor" instead of a constant "RED" in the code.

Customization of name colors is fairly common. I haven't seen a game where I can change the colors of hostile AoE effects however, this will be huge for me if SotA has the fairly common "dodge the random AoE" mechanic. Right now I have to jack with my monitor color settings for some boss fights in Rift with the combination of dark red AoE and dark floors. It looks awful but at least I can see and get out of stuff. I'm sure part of the reason is when they're doing AoE effects they often are not just one color; it's a cool looking particle effect plus a mostly transparent sphere (or whatever) with a base color and lots of gradations of that color as well. It might not be easy to make a whole range of colors user selected. This is where adding a border of a couple contrasting colors (so it shows up no matter the floor color scheme) that the user can set might be a much easier solution. Or you just decide to make the flames more orange than a pure red.

 

I think making it so you can set your own speech, UI, warning, overhead name, etc etc colours in the options would be best given the various types of colour blindness.

 

Great post!

I have a guildie in WoW that is color blind so I think that would be a great feature to have for the people who
need it.