Accessibility options urgently in need of update

[iiOmarSP]

I am personally unaffected by this, and can handle this sort of thing, but I can assure you that sometimes I would rather just lower the brightness on my TV because some of the content introduced in this patch is just a little too much for me

I agree with what kryptosona said, and I'd 100% vouch for a complete for a complete overhaul of this system because what we have is...not good.

[Rainfallen]

There needs to be more consideration for sight and readability in general. They've largely abandoned the standardized and clear mechanic telegraphs and have fallen into a common MMO trap of overly intricate and/or vague telegraphs of a color that's the same color as the lighting and/or arena, and even if you have battle effects off, the abilities that are shown regardless(LB3s being the most common) can easily obstruct things.

They REALLY have fallen into the modern MMO trap of hard = flashy and it's aggravating. I suffer from severe migraines, and i can only be grateful that I'm not epileptic or some of these fights would be literally impossible.

I do think some of the LB3s are silly to look at and enjoy some of them, and I admit, I verblind for shenanigans if I'm in a more gremlin mood. Only in normal content and with a majority of friends, however, never in serious content. But they can for sure be excessive and obstruct things, absolutely, and should have a toggle to have them display or not for folks. (LB effects being on even in gpose is aggravating NGL)

[Ziri_O]

Honestly, I might not be colorblind but I am extremely photosensitive and as much as I adore the spectacle and the special effects I get so tired of being bedridden by a migraine just because I wanted to do my raids.

I love disco, I adore the design of the new raids, but I've had to keep battle effects almost entirely off and pray I don't miss an important battle cue since Shadowbringers just because I don't want to feel like I'm dying afterwards. The Nier and Omphalos raids were wonderful but I still have to lie down for at least an hour if I get them in roulettes!

It's the year of Our Lady Hydaelyn 2025 we shouldn't have to beg and plead for accessibility options in our games just so we don't want to die within the first twenty minutes of prog. I have to spend the entire fights watching the arena from my peripheral vision while staring directly at my hotbars so I don't end up with my headache kicking in instantly from the bright flashing, quick color swaps, and the overall eyestrain. We need better than just "something is better than nothing" at this point, it's limiting people's ability to interact with the kind of content they love.

Do the devteam know how hard it was doing the latest trial with the purple aoes on the red carpet? Having to figure out if it was the colored dancefloor tiles or an aoe about to kill us? I want someone in QA with sensitivity problems to vouch for us with visual processing problems. I can't do savage raids or mount farm like this.

[Soren1234]

its... not just an issue for colorblind individuals either. I have 3 friends in my static who get really bad health complications from the super flashy stuff (blue flashes, yellowy orange flashes, and colorful flashes in general.)

Yoshi p... please give us thhe option to both change aoe colors and turn off boss effects. That would solve so many issues

[wyrmbr4nd]

My fiance is colorblind and physically could not do Phoinix, and is now having the same problems again with Recollection. Not even EX, NORMAL MODE. Orange on Orange on Red/pink with barely and discernible difference between the red and the pink is artificial difficulty and a huge accessibility gap. I myself have been so overwhelmed with some visuals that I get migraines more frequently after I started raiding. Fulgent blade is incredibly visually bad with the flashes and strikes going into other things, and stuff like Eulogia is so so horrendously bad to see what's going on as well.

[contresixtes]

Hi, I don't normally reply to threads, but I felt the need to make a post. I am disabled, I have chronic migraines that are triggered by photosensitivity and also am autistic and prone to sensory overload. I also have friends who are either red/green or blue/purple colorblind. This is not JUST a DT problem. This is a problem that has been increasing over time since SHB, however, the last time they were receptive to feedback was in SHB-- Mt. Gulg and Paradigm's Breach were both later adjusted. ENW and DT have so far received no such fixes.

The floor pattern in Recollection, whether normal or EX, is very difficult to see. The red and the brown are both desaturated making them very similar in value. For those who forget the definition, value is the lightness or darkness of a color-- how close it is to white or black. Since the brown and red are similar values, if you were to grayscale an image of Recollection's arena floor, they would be nearly if not the same color of gray. This is a problem for people who are colorblind, and anecdotally I've seen people who are not colorblind have trouble reading the arena too.

This is not the only fight this occurs in. For Wicked Thunder Savage, during the Ion Cluster mechanic (the cannon) four debuffs go out: dark blue, dark purple, light blue, and light green. The dark blue and dark purple are also almost identical in value, as are the light blue and light green. People who cannot see a combination of those colors have a difficult time reading these debuffs. Recollection and Wicked Thunder are just two examples, a lot of people have cited Phoinix here as an issue- and that fight gave me a migraine every time I raided.

I really feel like that SE is utilizing these difficult color combos to make the fights arbitrarily harder. They should not be doing this, not when there is hardly anything for colorblind/photosensitive people outside of third party tools, which are disallowed. One proof of these lights being utilized to make a mechanic more difficult is P12S, in the first phase-- I remember reading on Twitter that it was found when disabling the flashing white and purple galaxy lights to spare photosensitive people caused you to be able to read the mechanic (Superchain Theory I) a whole five seconds earlier. Why hide a mechanic behind flashing lights? Do mechanics really take that long to load in? Could NOTHING ELSE be put there as filler?

I had to skip out on DT EX3 entirely because of the amount of eyestrain. It gave me a three day migraine when I cleared it for DT and then again when I tried to clear its extreme version. SE, in the off chance you'll ever read this: PLEASE FIX THIS! People who WANT to be here can't! I like the story and raid series, and I am so excited for Shades' Triangle. But if something is not done about the VFX, debuff color values, and the arenas, I don't know how much longer I can keep raiding.

'Cause my migraine meds are EXPENSIVE.

[Rainfallen]

I had to skip out on DT EX3 entirely because of the amount of eyestrain. It gave me a three day migraine when I cleared it for DT and then again when I tried to clear its extreme version. SE, in the off chance you'll ever read this: PLEASE FIX THIS! People who WANT to be here can't! I like the story and raid series, and I am so excited for Shades' Triangle. But if something is not done about the VFX, debuff color values, and the arenas, I don't know how much longer I can keep raiding.

'Cause my migraine meds are EXPENSIVE.

I ALMOST had to skip on EX3 myself after how badly nauseous the normal made me going through story! It subsided, somehow, and I won't question that; but that fight gave me such a nasty headache that i was nauseous and had an especially bad migraine the next day. Chronic migraine havers rise up, carefully cuz we might get sick....

The only saving grace for me in EX3 was that Aethertithe only happened ONCE unlike in normal mode and the ice phase eased my nausea enough to do the final phase to clear it.

[Gwenkatsu]

its... not just an issue for colorblind individuals either. I have 3 friends in my static who get really bad health complications from the super flashy stuff (blue flashes, yellowy orange flashes, and colorful flashes in general.)

This. There were always some flashy whiteouts in the fights, but to me if feels like it's getting more and more. To the point where I have to repeatedly close my eyes for 5 seconds during trials and raids - guess how good that works out...

[GumshoeJump]

The visual clarity (or lack there of) in a lot of recent fights is just completely unacceptable. The sheer frequency in which I have been met with mechanics I cannot read for one reason or another is starting to become frankly miserable. M3S became impossible because the colours were all the same barely different shades of orange; made the visual tells impossible to glance read. M7N's visual tells are either rendered nearly impossible to read because of the boss' design and size, or downright insufficient to respond to (nice proximity you didn't give an indicator to, Square-- remember when you put a proximity indicator in the Copied Factory for that same mech? That was cool, I liked it, you should do it again).

I died repeatedly in Recollection because I had no ability to perceive the presence of the bleed puddle during roseblood bloom due to the fact the brown and red were nearly identical. The puddle may as well have been invisible to me; and I have rather good colour vision actually! It doesn't help that the puddle was additionally obfuscated by overwrought VFX for moves that take up the same amount of visual real estate as a common raidwide. I know I can disable party VFX, I just don't think the player vfx should be so excessive I am forced to disable it in order to play the game!

I cannot fathom how truly unplayable it must be for people who already need accessibility options this game only pretends to have. I desperately hope the team both reconsiders its current visual design habits for combat content, and gives us a way to override and modify visual indicators with our own choices in colour and mayhaps patterning!

[Utopian]

Last expansion my static had to adapt how we were handling/calling certain mechanics in savage because one of our members was colourblind and the existing options did little to help, the issue was already bad. This expansion a significant portion of people I know who are colourblind or have visual sensitivities/processing issues are struggling more than they have ever done before and it's getting to the point where bosses are relying too heavy on visual obfuscation and clutter/noise to amplify their difficulty. Even I, with no medical issues affecting my vision or visual processing, struggled heavily with EX4 and its readability to the point I outright gave up on clearing it and I think only two people in my static actually did in the end. Square need to be more mindful of what they're doing and dial back all of the clutter and flashing in addition to making their visual tells more uniform across encounters, having more extensive colourblind support with more thorough encounter testing, giving players the options to reduce all combat related visual effects down to just the essential ones and letting us change the default AoE colours.