Colourblind Issues

Hello this is a copy of a post made on the FFXIV subreddit. I have decided to post it here on the official forums as well so hopefully it can attract some developer attention leading to better accessibility options within the game

A brief overview:

Colour vision deficiency or colour-blindness is a disability which affects roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women. It affects the photoreceptor cones within the eyes of which there are three known as "L M and S". Colourblind people will have either absent cones or ones which do not function properly leading to them perceiving colour differently. People who have incorrectly functioning cones suffer from "Anomalous trichromacy" which is actually a range it may be so mild they may not even realise they have it or it can be more severe. People lacking a cone suffer from dichromacy and then monochromacy is when people are missing two of the three cones. The cone which is affected will then dictate which form of colourblindess you suffer from either being deutan (M cones) protan (L cones) or tritan (S cones). For example someone with an L cones which does not function properly would suffer from "Protanomaly" while someone missing a M cone would have "Deutanopia." For the purposes of this post i will mostly mention people who suffer from deutan and protan colourblindness as i do not know anyone who suffers from trianomaly/nopia and would not be able to comment on it. This image https://imgur.com/a/1P73F3A shows a comparison of normal vision to each of the 3 main forms of colour blindness in dichromatic forms so you can more easily see how a colourblind person sees different colours

Examples of problem mechanics within FFXIV:

In this post i will mainly be talking about two mechanics from two recent duties being the new 6.1 dungeon and P4S phase two there are other problem mechanics but these are the two most recent ones. P3S also has visual problems but that isn't just limited to the colour-blind that fight is a mess for nearly everyone. The first mechanic is the Akanthi act 4 tethers from p4s part two. In this imgur link https://imgur.com/a/DeEkicf are three images two of them have been altered to roughly simulate how a colourblind person would see the mechanic with the middle image simulating deuteranopia and the last image simulating protanopia. Purple is a particularly troublesome colour for the colour-blind as it is incredibly hard to distinguish from blue so it is quite baffling on why a mechanic that relies on you being able to tell which tether your have features these two colours furthermore these tether only appear for around 6-7 seconds and even if there are slight differences i think we can all agree that distinguishing the tether is much much harder for someone who is colourblind. The other mechanic i would like to bring up is the cloth pillars within the 6.1 dungeon (light spoilers for new dungeon within the images) Imgur: The magic of the Internet within this image the middle image simulates protanopia and the bottom deuteranopia. While with p4s the symbols where at least slightly different here the colours are very similar and colour is the only tell you can go off (After reading comments i have been informed there is a different number of knots which i did not notice) if i didn't show the original photo it would likely be very hard for you to tell which pillar is the safe one i did just that to around 20 friends and none of them could tell the difference (of course this is just an anecdote). I think you can get my point these mechanics while only two examples are still much much harder for people who are colour-blind to solve needlessly so.

Solutions:

The first (and most obvious solution) is to stop making colour based mechanics using well known problem colours for the colourblind with the new dungeon if it was yellow and blue used it would be easy to distinguish for everyone. While in p4s the colours are the way they are due to there being 3 types of tethers in Akanthi act 2 and with the purple tethers functioning similarly to the purple ones from act two the blue tethers do not function the same as act two and could of had their colour pallets swapped



The second solution is to improve the colourblind accessibility option while it is there it isn't even available on PS4 (at least is was not when i played PS4) and it isn't the most useful option instead of pre-set options give us a colour wheel where we can individually change each colour to one that better suits the individual as swapping one colour i cannot distinguish to another i cannot distinguish is not very helpful

Gshade is the option which i currently use although the third party tool clarification makes it questionable at best. While yes previously g shade has been said to be okay that was in an old forum post and it was not mentioned in the recent dev post which leads me to believe it is no longer okay (if the devs could clarify on this it would be great) furthermore g shade is not available for PS4. Hopefully g shades functionality will be added with the "UI updates" although I will believe it when I see it



Another solution which may not be usable for much longer (especially if you are a streamer) is ACT triggers. For example on p4s you can use a trigger to call out "purple" or "blue" for your tethers. This can of course be done by a party member for you assuming you are on voice



Conclusion:

FFXIV still has an issue with colour-blind accessibility as there have been many issues before some of which have been fixed others have not and new ones still continue to arise although i only mentioned two there are others (such as the one boss in bozja with the purple and blue telegraphs). While player created solutions exist many of them rely on blacklisted third party tools meaning a colour-blind streamer could get banned for using them and in order to follow the ToS I would not be able to recommend them to another colour-blind player. SE either needs to: Do more research when designing colour based mechanics, Expand on the colour blind settings or add some functionality from third party tools into the base game.

I understand that often shapes exist with colour based mechanics however they can sometimes be hard to see and expanding on the accessibility options available within the game to better suit what is currently available with third party software does not hurt anyone especially for those who are on console and currently are unable to access these settings and software.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hvinire

Utilizing such a tool would not violate any agreements customers have with Square Enix, and we don't plan on doing anything to restrict users from accessing it.

However, we advise that players use this at their own risk. Square Enix does not regulate the content of the aforementioned add-on and will not be responsible for any damage or losses resulting from its use.

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Gshade is not a violation of the ToS since it doesn't interact with the data of the game in any way, Shaders work through directx as far as i know (that's why gshade can also be used in other games) so it is neither a modification of the game data nor does it read the games data to present you with any advantage.

Saying Gshade is a violation is like saying having your browser open at the same time as XIV is a violation cause you could look up strats for a fight. If you use the Edge browser tho i have to admit you deserve a ban but that is a different story. <cough>

To be fair that is from 2013 if a dev could reiterate that just to ensure it is still the case within the current update that would also be great. That being said gshade is not available for console players so something needs to be done there

they put out the likes of p3s. i don't think this dev team cares about accessibility as much as they pretend to.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Eclipse4598

The first (and most obvious solution) is to stop making colour based mechanics using well known problem colours for the colourblind with the new dungeon if it was yellow and blue used it would be easy to distinguish for everyone. While in p4s the colours are the way they are due to there being 3 types of tethers in Akanthi act 2 and with the purple tethers functioning similarly to the purple ones from act two the blue tethers do not function the same as act two and could of had their colour pallets swapped.

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As a colour blind player the filters on the PC are a pretty amazing tool. i'd go so far as to say one of the best and most usable i've seen in any game i've played...

That said there are still occassions that prove difficult. It's kinda a difficult thing to get perfect though because many color blind people. estimated to be almost half. actually suffer from multiple types. If i recall correctly i'm proton/deutron 70:30 i think the ratio is or there abouts. been so many years since i did the tests.

think the most recent thing i really struggled with was one of the bosses in delubrum? (some relic thing). the water orb and the thunder orb basically looked far to similar in color so was it the dinut aoe or the knockback. ahhh hard to tell. yet if rng determined both orbs to pop at the same time it was easier to see which was which, one would be ever so slightly darker than the other ok thats thunder... but when only 1 pops.. is it the lighter one or the darker one.. with nothing to compare to it becomes trickier to distinguish which it is.

one of the 90 dungeons can be a pain too with pinkish markings on the floor and a slightly pink aura on the screen. sometimes you can barely make out a triangle or circle shape sometimes you cant.

they do take measures to try and help, but some of them could definitley be better.. sometimes you see like a water drop icon in the blue orb.. but the problem is the water drop icon is also blue just an ever so slightly different shade. and depending on the arena or what effects are going off at the time it can become invisible. especially if that blue orb is traveliing through a blue ground aeo or blue bubble effect..

they also do use shapes a lot. or patterns. but the issue there becomes when they're easy to distinguish but hard to describe to someone else.. the most memorable example of this is wanders palace hard back in the day.. green toad yellow damage up,,, or the one with 2 prongs pointing upwards in a kind of inny directions was toad. the one with 2 prongs pointing upwards in an outty direction was damage up.. trying to put that in party chat or something LOL...

There more examples i can remember the mechanic but not the content its in..

They could definitely do more. but the filters they put in are probably the best ive ever used in a game.. some games color blind modes are horrendous.

I personally am not color blind but one of my good friends is. He struggled in E6S, E7S (couldn't tell the difference between the portal colors), P3S, and I'm pretty sure he'd have a similar problem as E7S in P4S as there's purple/blue tethers. While I appreciate that so many things are clearly telegraphed, the game also fails at telegraphing other things in an accessible way. Like look at E12S door boss, there's colored tethers going to each portrait but there's also a sound cue for each tether, which was great. But there's no way to tell the difference between the blue and purple tethers in P4S if you have certain forms of color blindness. And even as a person without color blindness, P3S was a nightmare that wasn't helped by me having a professionally color calibrated IPS display so the orange was even more vivid.