Colour Accessibility in Dawntrail

I have been mulling over this post since the expansion released, but between the new Unreal and the new trial (particularly the EX), I've finally hit the point where I feel pressed enough to make it:

Dawntrail has been, and seems poised to continue to be, extremely hostile to colourblind players.

I can only speak from the perspective of a red/green colourblind individual (red being particularly bad, for me), but even with a relatively mild form of it, many fights are rendered next to unplayable. EX1 is a constant red on red/red on green flashbang. Everything about M3S was orange (something I thought the devs would have learned from after the community response to P3S). Suzaku remains orange on orange/brown on brown, with visual indicators on the floor that cannot be parsed by colourblind players. I understand that that's how the fight was. But frankly, fights should be brought to modern accessibility standards. The mechs do not have to change. And finally, EX4. The normal version of the trial already features extremely washed out and low contrast red/green floor indicators, and the extreme only exacerbates the issue.

I don't understand why this continues to happen. It's unacceptable, to be dead honest. The games industry has the technology to make accessibility better. The game has had many, many, many fights that do not have these issues. Doing better is possible. They just aren't.

There are two really pivotal changes that I feel can AND SHOULD be made in order to further accessibility:

1) Just don't design fights with inaccessible colour palettes. Full stop. M5-M8 are all visually stunning, cohesively themed fights without running into colour vision issues outside of one relatively minor mechanic in M6. And even if there was an aesthetic reason to lean into the same spicy chicken palette as P3, no aesthetic is worth sacrificing accessibility.

2) Implement better colour accessibility options. Full screen shaders are not a solution. They do not work, and have never worked. They strip contrast out of the visual elements on-screen because they are stripping out hard to see colours. The problem there is that we have, in our limited human vision, limited colours. Colourblind individuals rely very heavily on what contrast we DO get to parse things visually. Removing that makes it worse. Good colourblindness settings tweak the colours of ONLY important elements, which might include things like buffs, debuffs, and aoes.

Ultimately, I find this issue frustrating because better is so, so possible. The resources exist. This is not a small company. And it feels like folks like me are begging for scraps.

Please do better.

Protanopia leads to poor distinction in some blue/purple/pink palettes, which is a FF14 favorite combination, even allowing them to bleed into each other.

Flashes confuse matters further, and sudden bright white screens are no picnic when followed by low-contrast arenas.

This "aesthetics before accessibility" philosophy just adds to 14 feeling dated to me.

I would be in strong favour of option 2. I'm not colourblind so of course I don't know what it feels like and the fact that some content is unplayable for colourblind players is something that has to be fixed. As somebody who's not affected I do admit that I personally enjoy many of the colour choices from an aesthetic point of view though and imo it would be a bit sad if they would not be used at all anymore.

So I think an option (one that is well-thoughtout, well-tested and well-implemented) that accomodates colourblind players would be a middle ground that could serve all players.

Yes, this is extra work for SE because they would have to create alternative colour pallettes for certain fights but they are no small indie company and it's 2025. And quite frankly their players are something they should invest in.

I don't suffer to the severity of some, but I find it really difficult to focus when the arena is brightly lit. I miss mechanics, because it all just appears to be the same colour :(

At first, the arena was hard to read in the new trial, but I got used to it.

They should add more detailed color options, because I've seen it requested a lot of times. Actually, it was even put directly to them as a question and they asked "have you tried the settings we made for it?" and to give them an honest try. But I think that a lot of people have.

It is a difficult thing with mechanics though, because sometimes them being difficult to make out may be part of the mechanic and the settings could be abused to make a mechanic overly easy and obvious. But obviously it's a problem if you actually can't see it at all or it is causing problems.

Quote:

---

Implement better colour accessibility options.

---

The other option here is to provide an indicator that doesn't rely on color at all — for example, shape. And if you go looking, it's not actually uncommon for FFXIV to do exactly that.

The problem with Recollection (well, one of its problems) is that the attempt to use shape as differentiator for the floor tiles doesn't work well:

https://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...9b9f0d92e1.png

(Yes, that screenshot is intentionally in grayscale, to make the point.)

The tile in the foreground is red/bad; the tile in the background is gray/good. Unfortunately, they both have the ornate rose pattern imprinted on them. Simply eliminating that pattern from the gray/good tile would be an improvement.

In the absence of that, the intended "shape" differentiator is supposed to be a triangle in the red/bad tile, but it's very thin and hard to make out — one edge of this triangle is running diagonally upper-left to lower-right immediately to the right of the "Shake It Off (Over Time)" pop-up text. So, again, we're back to fixing the shapes and patterns on the floor.

Is there a reason why the already existing thread, created the exact same day for this subject was not sufficient to your needs, OP?

Yes, actually! Visibility for these issues is important, and more threads create more visibility. If you have an issue with the threads existing, I would encourage you to find other ways to elevate the viability of the issue, so that something is done about it, and the people affected no longer need to make them. Thank you for your concern.

This is a case of "the more the merrier". The more voices and posts about this issue, the better chance of Square seeing it. You don't have make a dig at OP for wanting to make their own post with their own take on the matter so it doesn't get lost in the sea of replies on the other thread.

Unfortunately, this has been an issue for a long time where accessibility has been lost at the expense of giving some more flashier effects. They were doing this atrocious design back in Eden's Verse too, which had some notoriously bad color usage. It's just so incredibly bad.

I am just convinced they don't really care at all about adhering to even the most rudimentary accessibility guidance, especially as they continue this superfluousness of aesthetics and visual appeal. It's the reason why Eden's Verse was the last time I've ever stepped foot in anything combat related above extremes. It's not fun when over half of the battle is trying to combat with incredibly bad accessibility.

Sadly, this thread and the other thread will just fade into obscurity, as they continue to double down in this incredibly poor mentality.

Do we still not have a proper color blind mode...? Huh I thought we did. Seems like something natural to make it just be a filter that makes it so color blind players can see things in video games.

That really sucks there seems to be a lot of things in the game that need address. For people's vision - Color Blindness and Eye strain.

I think there are fixes through Magitech Optical Distorters, which have some of the functionality people might be after. I feel bad though that such features are not currently being supported by the Dev team.

Here's a 2022 interview when this issue was last spoken about by Yoshi-P https://www.pcgamesn.com/final-fanta...-accessibility

I really hope the Dev team takes notice if this and tries their best. They honestly should have a division that looks into what is possible through Magitech and incorporate it.

Quote:

---

Do we still not have a proper color blind mode...? Huh I thought we did. Seems like something natural to make it just be a filter that makes it so color blind players can see things in video games.

---

If the real world has anything to teach us, it's that designing for accessibility as a baseline benefits everyone.

A special "color blind mode" or what-have-you should be the lastest of last resorts.

Crapping up the forums with additional threads on the same subject, so we can all have our own bespoke "visibility" eh?

Well, we get the forums we deserve i guess.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by klu

Crapping up the forums with additional threads on the same subject, so we can all have our own bespoke "visibility" eh?

Well, we get the forums we deserve i guess.

---

This is still one of the kindest threads created in Dawntrail. It's not the first time an issue will have more than one thread about it, and it certainly won't be the last, as SE has been turning a blind eye to a lot of the issues we have.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by pyrophoric

Full screen shaders are not a solution. They do not work, and have never worked. They strip contrast out of the visual elements on-screen because they are stripping out hard to see colours. The problem there is that we have, in our limited human vision, limited colours. Colourblind individuals rely very heavily on what contrast we DO get to parse things visually. Removing that makes it worse. Good colourblindness settings tweak the colours of ONLY important elements, which might include things like buffs, debuffs, and aoes.

---

(I have some vision issues, not color blindness, so I only know what I have researched about it.)

For mechanics where color is used to indicate things, it would not be so difficult to add toggleable options to replace those VFX with patterns or higher contrasting colors. The full screen shader is definitely a cop out and can be achieved through tools that just filter the desktop.

Those evil evil modders who break TOS have implemented countless accessibility fixes - some examples off the top of my head include changing the marker font to be more readable for people with dyslexia, and increasing contrast for AOE markers against orange backgrounds.
I understand that looking stylish is important for a game like this, and that the devs would want to design things to be pretty firstly, but making opt-in versions of the mechanics that are actually readable for people with vision issues would not take that much extra work and would make everyone happy - those with vision issues don't have to struggle to fumble through mechanics they cannot parse, and their teammates struggle less since they aren't needing to heal them more / adjust.

Like, I have dyscalculia (dyslexia with maths/numbers) and reading limit cut markers (or P9S levinstrike markers) is incredibly difficult for me, the way they're arranged looks stylish to most people but to me I couldn't resolve that mechanic without studying the shapes of each marker. Would adding a toggle to change the dots into a number ruin the fun of the mechanic for anyone else? No, but it would stop me from having a frustrating and embarrassing time apologizing for reading the number incorrectly and moving at the wrong time.

It's pretty obvious that those in charge of where money is being spent on developing the game don't give a damn about accessibility, so this is probably a pipe dream. :')

If you guys have Nvidia cards, they have a game filter with Nvidia Experience that allows you to mix and tune all color blind modes until you find a setting that is most comfortable for you.

I don't have any visual impairment, but lately I have had to play with those sliders as well to avoid eye strain.

"Kindness" had nothing to do with it.

When gardens aren't well kept, they overgrow with weeds. When forums are actively crapped up with multiple "I'm special too" threads, they become worthless. (Especially when vocal elements of the community encourage this.)

If your message is really important, one mega thread will do the job. Of course that severely limits how many people will see *your* special awesome totally new take on things, but then seeing the front page of a forum blasted with everyone and their mothers special awesome totally new take on things threads just means less people will give a damn about seeing your special awesome totally new take.

Because now it's spam.
And spam is bad.
Whether you think it applies to you or not.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by klu

When gardens aren't well kept, they overgrow with weeds.

---

Is this why you are in multiple threads, basically just going "no u", spamming the discussions with your snark that adds nothing to the discussion?

Anyway, yeah, some of the effects are...a choice. I'm not colorblind but I am pretty light sensitive, so I sympathize. I struggled really hard with the NieR raids - they make my eyes burn and Tower straight up gives me migraines with all the white-on-white and bright lighting. From what I've heard, the colorblind mode doesn't help much. It really wouldn't hurt them to design fights with colorblind friendly palettes or at least adding other indicators that would help. Many mechanics have those, but many don't. Besides, as has been pointed out, the fact that both the safe and unsafe tiles in Recollection have the rose pattern is really confusing.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

Is this why you are in multiple threads, basically just going "no u", spamming the discussions with your snark that adds nothing to the discussion?

---

Normally, I'd respond with "when you cant defend your position, something something profile troll" but my god you're so close to the answer here.

I am in "multiple threads" asking for basic forum hygiene... "multiple threads"...

"Multiple threads"

(Come on bro, I believe in you. Make the connection. You can do it.)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

Is this why you are in multiple threads, basically just going "no u", spamming the discussions with your snark that adds nothing to the discussion?

Anyway, yeah, some of the effects are...a choice. I'm not colorblind but I am pretty light sensitive, so I sympathize. I struggled really hard with the NieR raids - they make my eyes burn and Tower straight up gives me migraines with all the white-on-white and bright lighting. From what I've heard, the colorblind mode doesn't help much. It really wouldn't hurt them to design fights with colorblind friendly palettes or at least adding other indicators that would help. Many mechanics have those, but many don't. Besides, as has been pointed out, the fact that both the safe and unsafe tiles in Recollection have the rose pattern is really confusing.

---

Tower's effects on release caused seizures, which is the only reason they toned them down slightly. The only other case I can think of where they changed something to make it less of a pain(literally) is P3.