Can we talk about 3rd party tools and disability?

[ManaEterna]

Greetings everyone,

I would like to preface this post by saying that I am a legally blind person who main sage in both NA and JP datacenters. I spent most of my time in FF14 challenging savage content and I recently started Ultimate Alexander. My eyesight is about 6/60 with glasses. That means that what someone with a 20/20 vision can see at 60 meters, I need to be at 6 meters to actually see. As a result, I need to be around 2～3 inches away from my monitor to be able to see anything in the game.

As you probably all know at this point, there was a message posted recently by Yoshi-p Regarding Third-party Tools.

As a result of this message, I feel that a lot of people have been discussing the validity and purpose of those third party software and whether they should be seriously banned or not. To my understanding, many people feel that using such tools is basically cheating. While I don't want to discuss whether I agree or disagree with these opinions, I would like to discuss the specific case of accessibly in FF14 that relates to banning or not 3rd party tools.

For the past 7 years I have challenged and enjoyed extreme trials and savage raids. I started back in T5 (post nerf sadly) and managed to clear T6 before it was nerfed and felt a sense of pride every time I managed to clear another fight. However, with that pride also came countless hours of frustration as some mechanics were nearly impossible for me to distinguish properly. Ex Shiva's light mechanic markers on light blue, a3s Living Liquid and his tethers in the last phase, Noe Exdeath's colored beams and debuff, King Thordan's very flashy phase changes, are just a few among many difficulties I've had.

There is also the issue of being able to properly filter information: if the party frame is too small, then saying people's hp and debuff is difficult, but if it is too big, then it is difficult to see what is going on on my character. The cast bars are also somewhat difficult to see. You see, because I need to be so close to my monitor, I have somewhat of a small field of vision, so seeing all the required information while dodging mechanics and killing the boss is quite difficult. That is not considering that I cannot actually properly see party buff and debuff icons very easily.

Way back when I played wow, there were party frames addons such a Grid2 and such that made it possible to see the relevant information and only that, and it was much more visual than the default party frame, but in FF14 such a thing technically goas against the ToS. You might argue that it would make the game easier or give an unfair advantage, but for some people (I am sure I am not alone) the lack of these features makes it very hard to play on the same level as most people.

You could say that audio triggers are cheating, but when you cannot possibly look at the party frame, your feet and the cast bar of the boss at the same time in a way that lets read what spells are being cast, it is really difficult to realize that what is happening requires you to go left or right of the boss for example (larboard and starboard anyone?)

At the end of the day, I realize that posting here will probably bring arguments and I hope that we can all remain civil about this situation.
I really do wish that Square Enix took accessibility more seriously so that the game could be enjoyable by everyone equally and I do understand that spending more money on a small(er) portion of the community can be difficult but I sincerely hope that things improved in the future, especially if they are going to come down seriously on third party tools.

Also, while I am not saying that I am using third party software, this post mostly comes down to a personal critique of the game's lack of accessibility in ui and fight design.



P.S.: If you don't know how to make things better, I'll gladly work for you!　＾＾

[Arzalis]

I kind of think you should be taking your disability to a Monitor Manufacturer, not a game dev, you see where I'm going with this?

They surely could create a Monitor for such disabilities.

No, it can clearly be fixed with software. If SE is ever going to take a stance on third party addons, they need to step up their accessibility game.

Orange abilities with an orange enemy on an orange background with orange AoE markers was absurd.

[Doragan]

P3s is such a gigantic joke, that's pretty much the reason why I started looking into using Nvidia Freestyle/reshade.

Being able to change the color for the aoe markers would be a great start. For the hitbox circles as well. That would help a lot.

And make it accessible for PS4/5 please. I don't care that the console have a system for it (which doesn't work as well btw), there's no reason for it not being implemented ingame for these versions specifically. Please. Thank you.

I kind of think you should be taking your disability to a Monitor Manufacturer, not a game dev, you see where I'm going with this?

Actually, FFXIV is an outlier compared to other SE games specifically. Guardians of the Galaxy had a pretty robust accessibility setting from the get-go when you start the game. Same for LiS.

Clearly, they're able to do it with their other games. It's 100% possible on FFXIV.

[Kaurhz]

For the past 7 years I have challenged and enjoyed extreme trials and savage raids. I started back in T5 (post nerf sadly) and managed to clear T6 before it was nerfed and felt a sense of pride every time I managed to clear another fight. However, with that pride also came countless hours of frustration as some mechanics were nearly impossible for me to distinguish properly. Ex Shiva's light mechanic markers on light blue, a3s Living Liquid and his tethers in the last phase, Noe Exdeath's colored beams and debuff, King Thordan's very flashy phase changes, are just a few among many difficulties I've had.

Not sure if this is in any way correlated to what issues I have, but I can say the overall experience surrounding raiding, and the plethora of issues I had in Eden's Verse surrounding accessibility and to some degree sensory overload has placed this game on the bottom of the charts of any game I'll consider raiding in again. Now the latter I generally take little issue in, but the experience I had in Eden's Verse was just outright disgusting, compounded by the fact that at the time I was on console, so any native accessibility settings didn't and still do not exist for some bizarre reason.

Personally, for me the annoyances I encountered in my 'limited' experience do not outweigh the possible self-satisfaction I would get from actually completing raids.

Now my minor gripes relating to the sensory overload, I genuinely don't see why they need to over-glorify on graphical effects

[BokoToloko]

As someone also legally blind and deaf to boot, I wholeheartedly agree with this. 3rd party software is a huge resource for accesibility and trying to limit it without any accessibility choices to compensates can get very annoying for some. WoW does add some features to help and allows for addons to fill in the blanks, to the point someone completely blind can play (albeit not independently) the game to some extent.

I'm really on board with clearer acoustic cues for mechanics. I don't think it can be cheating if it's done properly. A very simple example would be a cue to tell the boss is commencing a cast, so we can focus on the rest of the screen and look up what mechanic is coming up when the sound goes off. Personally, just this alone would work wodners for me because of my reduced field of vision.

I do wish I could get a more nuanced setting on graphics too, because I have to rely on Gshade in order to even distinguish something on moments where there is little light and contrast (Ultima Thule being a main offender, but some places like Black Shroud zones with clouds+night being there).

[Avidria]

Yeah I don't use addon's but P3S almost pushed me to it. Orange on orange on orange is absolutely awful. My eyesight's pretty bad too, and the amount of flashy obnoxious visual noise gets kind of out of control in this game. It gets so bad on some fights that I literally can't tell what's going on and just have to follow other people to avoid mechanics that register as a blur of color and light to me. That's not even added difficulty, it's just annoying.

There are definitely some things they could do natively that would help a ton, even just with more scaling options and more ways to divide up the UI to get the information I care about and ONLY the information I care about. Like, letting me see only my buffs and also any other melee buffs (like feint) and nothing else. And more options for toning down visual effects because the choices in what shows and what doesn't on limited/none don't always make a ton of sense imo.

[Rongway]

Being able to change the color for the aoe markers would be a great start. For the hitbox circles as well. That would help a lot.

The color of the target's hit circle can be set by changing the nameplate color for engaged enemies.

[JanVanding]

Yeah I don't use addon's but P3S almost pushed me to it. Orange on orange on orange is absolutely awful. My eyesight's pretty bad too, and the amount of flashy obnoxious visual noise gets kind of out of control in this game. It gets so bad on some fights that I literally can't tell what's going on and just have to follow other people to avoid mechanics that register as a blur of color and light to me. That's not even added difficulty, it's just annoying.

There are definitely some things they could do natively that would help a ton, even just with more scaling options and more ways to divide up the UI to get the information I care about and ONLY the information I care about. Like, letting me see only my buffs and also any other melee buffs (like feint) and nothing else. And more options for toning down visual effects because the choices in what shows and what doesn't on limited/none don't always make a ton of sense imo.

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.

[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.

[JanVanding]

snip



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.

Exactly why I have to use Reshader, it's not just a singular on the RGB spectrum. If colours are too close/samey I can't differentiate and instead of to rely on shapes/animations

Which If you got an entire arena and boss and mechanics that are all just a different Shade of the same colour

I'm going to have a much harder time making out just what the heck is going on and that's simply something I can't help with what's provided ingame or through GPU settings. It's very much a problem with the fights design choice.