Can we talk about 3rd party tools and disability?

[Packetdancer]

If SE is ever going to take a stance on third party addons, they need to step up their accessibility game.

This. This this this this. One of the most significant advantages of mods is being able to make changes to improve usability/accessibility for various scenarios.

Now, in fairness, few game companies have the time to really comprehensively come up with comprehensive accessibility options, especially since there's not really any "one size fits all" accessibility solution. But for many games, you can let the community create a variety of accessibility mods appropriate for a number of different scenarios.

For instance...

Having a local friend who enjoyed games and who was hearing-impaired, I wrote a mod for one game that basically hooked the audio code to improve usability in cases like hers. Whenever the game played a sound, my mod would look up the sound file in a table, and if it found a string in that table tied to the file it would then print that string visibly on the screen. Meaning that a deaf player was not oblivious to audio cues (including combat noises that might be relevant in PvP).

It did not, to my mind, provide any unfair advantage, because it was information any hearing player would have if they were paying even a smidge of attention to the audio cues; if there was no audio cue, there was no sound to look up and string to find.

Another person went the opposite way, and had a prototype that would convert a description of important visual events into plaintext for text-to-speech for vision-impared players, akin to this thread's OP. ("Tank's health is low!" "<enemy> is casting <name of whatever ability appeared on the enemy's cast bar>!")

Again, things a player with good -- or at least, passable -- vision could just see for themselves.

As a third example, I had a friend who had sustained severe nerve damage to his hands during his military service, and thus who could not play effectively at a high level; honestly he could barely type coherently at all, because it was hard to hit specific keys. So at one point, I started prototyping a system for him that would map multiple keys to specific input, so that as long as he hit one of about six different keys, it would process the event appropriately, meaning he'd only have to strike in the correct area of the keyboard rather than a specific correct key.

(I stopped the project when said friend passed away due to complications from the flu; I handed the code off to someone else because I didn't have the heart to keep working on it. Incidentally, get your flu shots.)

I'm on record as saying I think an official modding API would be a mistake at this point in FFXIV's development, and I stand by that; retroactively stuffing a mod API into a project is incredibly difficult to do right, given that it'll either be shallow and disappointing or stuck into the systems in a way that may be exploitable.

But if SQEX isn't going to support mods, then sort of by definition they can't offload accessibility considerations on the community. And if they're not offloading the responsibility for providing accessiblity options onto mod authors, then I do think it's reasonable to expect they do at least a little work in that direction themselves.

(At the very least they ought to stop with orange-and-yellow-and-red on orange-and-yellow-and-red, or blue-on-blue, or whatnot; those are obnoxious even to those who can see.)

In the same boat, have no choice but to use Reshader settings because P3S does not like Deuteronomy one iota. I can't for the life of me begin to comprehend how this fight is for someone with partial sightedness or full colourblindness.

Brief aside here: there actually are colorblindness settings on the Windows version, but so far as I can tell it uses Windows monitor colorspace configuration to adjust the colors while the app is running. Which means it exists only on the Windows version, as the color-correction code is not in the game itself but rather in the OS.

It also does not appreciably approve the annoyance of P3S, because you just end up correcting all the red/orange/yellow to something else, and it's still all a muddled mess of similar colors.