Accessibility Discussion: Color Blindness and Deck System

Howdy folks,

Since returning to the game after a very extended absence, I've decided to make a brief write up of various disability and accessibility issues I've observed in SotA. These issues are not necessarily unique to me, but they are informed by my own experiences as someone with multiple disabilities, so forgive me if I overlook or miss out on an aspect of an issue I bring up. This post is going to be the first of a series of such posts, so if I don't cover something you find to be an accessibility issue with SotA (or something it does right!) please feel free to drop me a message!

Color Blindness, and Color Deficiency
Foremost, let me preface this discussion by saying I personally do not have any color deficiency issues with my vision. However, my sister does have such issues, and so I have often been acutely aware of these problems in games due in part to her struggles. I do, however, have some visual acuity issues (very severe myopia and astigmatism). So hopefully, I'll not be talking out of my ass too severely here. I should note that this is a very common problem, and it should not be ignored by game developers. In the US alone, about 7% of biological males and 0.4% of biological females have some form of colorblindness. Localized population rates of occurrence of colorblindness of some form can be as high as 10% of biological males in some regions of the world.

Issues with the perception in color come in a number of common variations. Most common are forms of Red-Green colorblindness, followed by Blue-Yellow colorblindness, and, most rarely, Total Monochromacy.

Foremost, let us address the deck hotbar UI, and how different forms of color deficiency or blindness can affect its usability.


Here is a sample Deck during combat as seen by someone with normal color vision.

This is the same deck with the colors adjusted to mimic the perception of someone with Red-Blind/Protanopia form color deficiency. Notice that red, green, and yellow are now very difficult to distinguish between. It also means that the red and yellow of the glyphs is very hard to pick out against the color of the ground texture behind it.

Similar issues exist with this sample of Green-Blind/Deuteranopia, seen above.

A different set of issues presents itself with Blue-Blind/Tritanopia vision. Now, glyphs with yellow centers on red background no longer have any real distinguishing contrast, and become very difficult to pick out from one another. Additionally, on any dark colored texture, red and yellow glyphs become very hard to see against the background. Gold on yellow glyph centers also suffer in that their internal images become hard to distinguish.

For Red-Weak/Protanomaly vision, the problems are not as severe as our previous three cases. Glyphs retain quite a lot of distinction, but overall color vibrancy has been lost. The same holds true for Green-Weak/Deuteranomaly, with similar effects. For a person with Blue or Yellow Cone Monochromacy, the bar is actually quite usable (a surprise to my sister, who was used to most UIs being terrible for this). The same holds true for a true Monochromant, though there is a massive loss of contrast.

The largest problem with the deck/bar UI currently for color deficient vision problems is the glyph stacking highlighting system. Currently, it highlights with a green box around the glyph. In many of the above, notice how for yellow or red glyph backgrounds, this could cause the green box to be completely invisible, or simply very difficult to distinguish.

How could these issues be resolved in a manner that does not require a complete redesign of the UI? A simple answer would be to allow for the implementation of different color adjustment overlays (one good example of a game that does this well, oddly, are the Battlefield games). Another would be to allow users to select the color for the stacking/combo highlight box themselves.

While I've primarily talked about the hotbar UI in this post, other parts of the UI are equally problematic for these sorts of visual color perception issues.


Nameplates during combat, as well as health bars, can be a challenge to process even for those with normal color vision. But take for example what a person with Blue-Blind/Tritanopia would see in place of the above image. It becomes impossible, or nearly so, to tell a red name from a yellow one, making picking targets quite a matter of luck! (And for a person with Blue-Weak form, orange, red, and yellow all seem the same!)


Again, these issues could be addressed with some very simple UI skinning options for indicator colors, or with custom selection of colors for nameplates for players (Final Fantasy XIV ARR does a very good job with this).

I'd like to conclude here for now, and hope that these observations are useful for the Devs. I'd also like to ask for any feedback from the community on this, as well as on other accessibility issues you might want to see me address in future posts.

Thank you

 

Great post. The devs are in the process of trying to update options for the UI to make it more viable for various vision problems. I know @dallas has done a big push to help get this in game.

 

Thumbs up here. I'm red/green deficient and it has caused issues in the past with gaming (mostly in the form of my wife thinking I'm crazy for casting the wrong spell gem and letting her die...maybe intentional?...maybe not??.. hah)

 

+1 for this post. I'm red/green colorblind, and would love to see more options for my fellow people with colorblindness.

 

Yes dallas had a few of us group together and come up with some solutions.

I created several name plate pallets for the different forms of impairment and submitted them, they seemed to like them
But currently the tech team is very busy, though this is on their radar, so know that there will be options coming down the line.

I imagine youll see stages of solutions. First will be some color swap options for UI and Name plates.
Later you may see full screen overlay/gameplay options.

Ive pointed out that some game elements can be tricky, Like the harvest trees are indicated by having red leaves. In a wooden scene that has alot of green, this is an issue for some.

The best solution would be the color UI options with a screen overlay, both are controlled by a "strength" slider that allows to fine tune the degree at which best works for the player.
This would be best as even with the same type of impairment there can be many degrees of impairment, some have it a slightly, some are completely effected.

You can let your sister know they have this on their radar.

 

THIS. Those trees were impossible for me to spot when I first started playing. Thankfully, I have since just memorized their locations in the zones I harvest them. Those first few weeks I played though it was a nightmare trying to find trees to harvest.

 

Thank you everyone for all the support and feedback. I had guessed that some parts of this were already on the dev's radar, given how common the issue can be, but I thought I'd start with this write up as it was the easiest one to make people aware of accessibility issues since it is one where I can show people what is going on.

I actually have a weird problem with some shades of blue (Why I never got my Shiva EX clear in Final Fantasy XIV), so the night vision in this game is currently the bane of my existence as far as color perception goes. I was planning on including it in this post, but realized I had forgotten to take screenshots when I was writing it up.

The next write up is probably going to be about UI fonts, colors, and sizes, since this is one that affects me very directly. I think after that, I'll probably write up the targeting issues, and save the input customization for last, as it is the one that will take me the longest to make mock-ups for. Again, if anyone would like to send me suggestions for other topics, I'd love to hear from you!

 

Color blind assistance would definitely be nice. Many newer games include this now. I do personally have some form of color blindness (not sure what it's called). I did one of the tests that have the colored circles with numbers hidden in the colors at my eye doctors, and I got a score of 2 out 20 correct lol...

I have troubles with these colors:
- blue and purple
- red and brown
- yellow and green

It all really depends on the shades though. I can easily tell the difference between a bright yellow and a dark green, but not a light yellow and light green. I've actuallly never seen an enemy NPC's nametag in this game as being green... they all look yellow, orange, or red to me (I'm adventure level 73).

That said, other than floating name issues, I haven't had any issues that have negatively impacted my ability to play the game. Yeah, it can be hard to tell the color of the outline around glyphs on the deck bar, but I just match the glyph pictures rather than the colors of the outlines. I did have an issue with the quest in Soltown that requires you to find the guy wearing red who set the fire until I figured out you just gotta go around asking everyone "red."

This sounds kind of like my issue from Google, although it's missing the yellow and green part: "People with deuteranomaly and protanomaly are collectively known as red-green colour blind and they generally have difficulty distinguishing between reds, greens, browns and oranges. They also commonly confuse different types of blue and purple hues."

 

If you tag me in the posts (@moise and click my name) I'll make sure to link them in the discussion group Leostorm was mentioning.

 

the solutions for these concerns can be appreciated by everyone. i get a perfect score on this, but was nonetheless quite happy when they added the little x to the deco placement ui.

 

This is the score I got lol:

 

I notice a slight pattern going on there...

I just kicked that link to a few people at work. Curious to see what their results are.

 

Yeah, I shared it with a couple of coworkers just now too. They got a score of 8 and 4. Which likely means they just made a mistake rather than having actual color blindness issues.

 

I'm partially colorblind as well. I have difficulties keeping several colors (usually green and red, but others I don't know the english word for right now, too) apart when they have a similar grey-value. In SotA this wasn't that much of a problem up to now, atleast as far as I can tell. But having some options to switch to a more discernable color-scheme would be VERY welcome. The worst thing for me usually is (for example) to tell the difficulty-color-code for monsters here. Is it green? orange? yellow? red? Hard to beleive, but especially when the displayed area is only small it is impossible for me to tell which color it acutally is. With larger areas it's easier to tell, depending on the choosen color. That's why I really would like to see some non-colored coding-option for such cases.

 

I cannot discern the color of monsters either. I figured I had a setting or something off; glad other color challenged folks are having the same issue. They will fix this now they know disabled folks need some help. Port is great about these kinds of accommodations.