Colour Accessibility in Dawntrail

[pyrophoric]

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.

[Mawlzy]

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.

[Loggos]

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.

[Lollerblades]

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

[Jeeqbit]

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.

[AmiableApkallu]

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:

(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.

[klu]

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

[pyrophoric]

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.

[Ashteroza]

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.

[Kaurhz]

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.