game needs more support for colorblind people

[grinkdaboy]

i have friends who are colorblind and today i recruited somebody new to my static who is tritanopia (blue-yellow colorblindness). i am more than happy to accommodate them, but i am surprised by the lack of accommodation afforded by the dev team to players affected by this. this lack of support is most noticeable in savage/ultimate content where some mechanics are coded purely by color (i'm looking at you, high concept).

sometimes there are symbols present but it's not a guarantee. there's also an issue of the arena itself being colored a certain way (e4s, e8s) that can make things much harder than they need to be. and i'm well aware there is more than one type of color-blindness so this makes it even worse. i don't think it would be too hard to add more accessibility options such as symbols or letters for these mechanics or the boss arena.

it's also questionable at least to me when there was an effort made for this in the ew msq (zodiark having square and triangle cleaves, hydaelyn having colors but also visually wielding a weapon depending on what color) but they can't do the same for savage/ultimate raiders

[Kes13a]

whats wrong with the colour filtering settings in System Configuration> Accessibility Settings> Colour Filtering?

I am not colour blind but I know those settings are there. ever tried those?

[Midareyukki]

whats wrong with the colour filtering settings in System Configuration> Accessibility Settings> Colour Filtering?

I am not colour blind but I know those settings are there. ever tried those?

I have! And I can tell you, they don't work as well as you think they do!

They only lower/increase the saturation for some colours, and you can change the amount. This is fine for some instances, I won't lie. But when the instance is all the same colour, such as E9S or P3S, you're not going to get much mileage out of it. Kampeos Harma was literally pants for me because it didn't matter if I had the in-game filters on. Deuteranopia didn't make a marked change for me to understand which was which, and Protanopia barely made a noticeable difference. It was both horrifying for me and hilarious for my friends to just see me staring at the computer monitor gawping because I was like "I... I can't tell the colour, what the hell!". It was an absolute GODSENT that they actually put squares and triangles, because I'd be so screwed.

Or take my early forays into Bozja. I did realize that the AoEs on the Mandragora FATE had a pattern, but I kept dying until I learned what the patterns were. Because turns out, I kinda can't go in with colours, and changing saturations doesn't exactly help. Since, you know, the darker you make a blue, the closer to purple it looks.

Or, you know, my absolute favourite... Having the C and D markers look identical, just with a different brightness level (C is brighter than D), and then I turn on shaders and SOMEHOW D IS NOW THE SAME AS A INSTEAD.

:facepalm:

:internal screaming:

Turns out C is blue, D is purple and A is magenta. Literally the colours I struggle with. Now, you might think "well, you can just read what's on there". And yeah, it's stupid that I don't. But I immediately go for the bright flashy thing rather than reading it xD this one's on me, but it does trip me up to go for the one I think is right, only to then be like "ABORT, IT'S THE WRONG LETTER".


...So yeah. The in-game shaders really do only take you so far, and it's the presence of patterns and other visual cues that tips me off. Another example is Mt Gulg, where before they added the glowy border to the AoEs in there, I had to really squint to figure out the differences between "glaring white" and "pale yellow". And no amount of in-game shaders are gonna help with that!
Like, I won't say they're absolutely useless. But they're not as robust as you'd require for a game this heavy on telegraphs and identifying animations. Because on other games, either stuff is quite stationary or I can just see the boss's animations just fine to react to them. FF14 is a choreographed game with telegraphs.

And like I said over yonder... I have it MILD. I can't even imagine how worse it is for people with full-on colourblindness. Because my main concern is that I can't go overboard with the shaders because a) I don't need to, and b) it makes the game look darker, which doesn't help in distinguishing darker/lighter hues. And hell... I don't even know if the setting I'm on is appropriate for me. Because I supposedly have Deuteranomaly? But the Protanopia settings help sometimes far better than the Deuteranopia one does...

[VStruct]

whats wrong with the colour filtering settings in System Configuration> Accessibility Settings> Colour Filtering?

I am not colour blind but I know those settings are there. ever tried those?

As someone who's colourblind, colour filters in video games are a pretty awful way to solve the issue, if they even do. They tend to just shift the problem to another group of colours (i.e. two colours you had trouble with before are fine now, but a different pair of colours gets filtered to that same combination. The problem hasn't really gone away, it has just moved). On top of that, colour filters tend to make games look ugly. This game can be very pretty at times, and I shouldn't have to give that up just to be able to read a mechanic correctly.

In general, a good way to make your game colourblind friendly is to provide extra symbols in situations where colour is the primary way information is conveyed. Letting players customise the colour of UI widgets is also much appreciated.

Square Enix are generally pretty good at giving colourblind players a way to resolve the mechanic with varying symbols/VFX. I don't have too much trouble with High Concept, but that might just be a difference in type of colourblindness, and I don't know which specific part is giving OP trouble.

[Midareyukki]

Just to illustrate.



These are the normal ones. C and D look similar, C is just a bit brighter than D is.



This is my normal Deuteranopia setting. C and D look different, D looks far darker, but it gets closer to A and 1 for some reason?



This is Protanopia instead. C is far sharper for me and I can tell it's full-on blue. D is a bit faded but it's somewhat purple, though it's moved back to the blue on C a bit. It's still close to A but less so than the above image. Whatever, it's far darker here and thus it's a bit more noticeable for me. And A is nice and red. Probably can be dumb and mistake C for D still, but the difference is far more pronounced.

Which, again, it's weird. I run the game on Deuteranopia, because that's what lets me see things a bit clearly despite it being mild. Yet on this, Protanopia works better?

[Kemiko]

Also, I'm just going to add to this that while those settings absolutely could be better, they're also non-existent on consoles. So, yes, all around the game could definitely do better in this area.

[kaynide]

Honestly this is one of those things you should just be able to assign color to like names.

This and the orange hazard zone indicators.

[Kes13a]

I have! And I can tell you, they don't work as well as you think they do!

*snip*

yeah, I wasnt sure if the settings would be useful or not since I dont have the problem.

might be able to change things in GPU settings, but thats a lot of testing to try and even attempt that by adjusting those settings for a single game.

would be ideal if they worked on the colour settings for those that need them since I am sure some form of the problem affect quite a few people, more people for instance, than were bothered by the old sage symbol....

[Jojoya]

SE has been working with their colorblind settings in response to feedback from players. Continuing to give feedback on specific problems would be helpful to them.

Now if you're upset with SE's progress, can you point to a game that has solved the problems for colorblind individuals in like situations so SE could learn from those examples as well?

It can be really easy to say "do better" but "doing better" isn't always as easy as it sounds.

[Kazelus]

I can tell that a lot of savage mechanics actually have indicator for color blind people.

When I've done E8S it was with a color blind friend and he show me those sign (Shape on mirror for exemple, each color have a different shape).

For HC1, people made the mistake to use color for an elemental mechanics, all tower have a different ground style and some elemental hints around her (The green one have a tornado, the purple have lightning all around and the blue one is showing water.) so they already have support for colorblind people and on HC1, you have to look for elements instead of color.

Can't tell for all mechanics but I know that fight are designed so you're not forced to recognize colors to resolve the mechs, you just need to find the hints.

(Markers, yeah, that's the letter and number, you need to works on looking at this.)