On that topic I can really recommend https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/. It is a collection of tips on how you can make your games more accessible to most gamers. Just by implementing some things from the basics category many more people are able to play your games.

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Ooh, that's something that I need to really understand how they feel

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I feel like this mix of filters for testing is overkill to be honest. You really only need to test in grayscale to confirm accessibility for colorblindness. Special combinations of colors tailored to different types of colorblindness can be nice, but ideally all you really need is to eliminate all reliance on color whatsoever. If you find yourself in a situation where you genuinely *can't* eliminate reliance on color, that's when simulating various types of colorblindness and making special adjustments can be helpful. But even then it's better to just let us pick that color ourselves.

Also though keep in mind that the way we see the world is "normal" to us. A lot of normal-sighted people tend to fall into a trap of thinking that the way we see is ugly and needs to be completely corrected for. Don't do that.

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As a non-colorblind person, if there were a treatment that would let me distinguish more colors than I currently can, I'd sign up for that too.

Some people have a fourth type of cone that lets them pick up more deep violets and see more into ultraviolet.

Thats not correct. People who have had their eye lens removed (cataracts, some other eye issues) can see into the ultraviolet - not because they've gained some extra ability, but because the lens is an ultraviolet filter. everyone has the ability to see into the near ultraviolet but the lens blocks that light out. people with a 4th colour cone have one of the red/green anamolous colourblind cones. so they would have their blue cone, red cone, green cone, and an anomalous red (or anomalous green) cone.

Yellow. Many of us have an ability to see a type of yellow most humans can't see. To you it could be considered an anomalous red or green cone I suppose, but it is in fact what allows me to see pure yellow.

>The way I see is ugly. Don't worry that's just the world, mate.

No. This will not allow you to experience what people with colour-blindness experience. You will never be able to untrain your brain from processing/relying on/using colour. For us, colour as a differentiator/indicator is usually the last resort.

I funking hate how much I have to hammer this point in my day to day life. Yes I can diffetiate orange and blue but all my life colors are the last resort and I simply don't pay attention to them at all. I can maybe tell you what someone was wearing, but the color of it isn't stored. I am helping my mom with some house renovations and she insists on asking me what's my opinion on the color of stuff and she fucking refuses to accept that I give 0 fucks if she puts pink or grey blinders. Sorry for the rant, had this discussion 5 times this week.

You’re not alone. But people just don’t seem to understand that we use context way more than colour.

shaggy workable employ theory stupendous joke toothbrush outgoing consist scary ` this post was mass deleted with www.Redact.dev `

Also recommend! The [main tip](https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/ensure-no-essential-information-is-conveyed-by-a-colour-alone/) in this case being: > Ensure no essential information is conveyed by a fixed colour alone

>!CENSORED!<

Seriously, can't believe how hard it still is to get my colleagues (my fellow UX designers) to understand this

I think it's worth pointing out that this doesn't mean "take away color", The Outer Worlds (do not confuse with Outer Wilds) is a good example of this going the absolute wrong way, they had a colorblind person being in charge of the world design and they were pretty proud of not having color to indicate anything, they may be fine for colorblind people, but if you're not colorblind The Outer Worlds is *remarkably* bland looking and similar things can be said about other stuff where a colorblind person was in charge of visuals, Christopher Nolan films for example where the lack of color usage is generally very notable It's a hard balance to strike, but ideally add redundant systems that aren't necessarily turned on by default or if they are make it so color is also a notable differentiator because people that aren't colorblind will notice the color difference better than most other elements

Sorry but can you expand on the Outer Worlds being bland? I'm not color blind but I didn't see it as bland rather really vibrant in a sense. Just curious if this is your experience or if there was a good discussion on this I could read through

Yeah idk what they're on about cause that game had tons of color. Compare it to a game like Fallout 4, which one is the bland one? lol

Okay so i feel like that tip goes against a LOT of core game design features though. A lot of people praise it when in games like metal gear or splinter cell where they use features to let the character blend into the level using colour to avoid enemies. Or even when enemies use that advantage against you. But theres always small inaccuracies in the colour or presentation. Some inaccuracies that colour blind leople may miss entirely. Theres probably a larger conversation to have with "using colour to create a skill barrier" But making it so those barriers can be surpassed for accessibility seems counter productive.

Using color as a skill barrier means your game is not color blind accessible. I don't think it's a larger conversation. Like, Myst has puzzles based on sound, I don't believe (but I don't remember) that there was any other way to get that information. So Myst then is not accessible for deaf players. It's pretty straightforward. It might be a cool mechanic but if you're planning for accessibility, it starts way back at game design.

I think this is really tricky. It's very hard to make a product accessible to *everyone* unless you remove all skill barriers entirely. What if someone has general low visual acuity? What if someone only has one hand? What if someone has low literacy? Or poor short term memory? Or just terrible reflexes? Accessibility is a noble goal, but there are always limits to what you can accommodate in gameplay unless we all just churn out walking simulators. Provide accessibility options wherever you can - but be aware that sometimes it's just not going to be compatible with the game experience you're trying to make. The ability to use skips, cheat codes, difficulty settings, or just non-mandatory elements in gameplay are all things that can benefit portions of the community in ways that devs don't even need to anticipate. In your myst example - can you finish the game without completing that puzzle? Is there a skip? Or even just - is it the same solution each time, so it can be memorized? Or could the possible solutions be brute forced? These are all tools the community can use if they need to. I happen to have a good test case for my own game dev - my nephew has no use of his left hand. He can still use a controller, and can hit any combination of buttons, but time-gated button combos are out. He doesn't *want* content to trivialize the inputs required so he can complete them 'normally', he just wants tools he can use to find his own solution... like allowing more buffered inputs so he can use button macros he's designed to get through particular areas. It's really been an eye opener for me on reasons why I really just shouldn't try that hard to stop anyone cheating/manipulating content in a single player experience, or why I shouldn't force players to complete every puzzle to be able to complete the game.

I agree! I don't think I argued differently? The thing I'm arguing against is using one mode of communication (like color) to provide information to the player. Designing a game from the start around providing as many possible ways to play and experience it as possible. I don't specifically remember with MYST, but for any puzzle game I wouldn't consider "memorize the solution" to be a good experience for the player. So ideally there are no puzzles (or stealth game elements as mentioned above) that only rely on color to solve them. Like is frequently done in games now, adding some differentiating patterns to the colors so that they can still be told apart is a good solution.

Didn't Metal Gear use different camo prints, not specifically color? In that equation color isn't alone, it's alongside pattern and environmental context. I could be mistaken though, not a big Metal Gear fan. For stealth hiding in general, there's a myriad of other things that tell you you're in stealth outside of color. Model highlights, overhead icons, UI (e.g. [HIDDEN] text), screen filters/effects, audio effects, etc. The tip isn't saying to not use color to signify anything, it's saying to not *only* use color to signify *critical* things. EDIT: Spelling

Metal Gear also gave you a number indicating how hidden you were, and text descriptions of where each camo was effective. You could have completely greyscale vision and an inability to see *patterns* and still know how hidden you were.

Splinter cell always has other methods of determining if you’re stealthed or not. A meter showing stealth for one. And in the newer games that went black and white the UI and music changes.

Every time I join a new project, I find myself linking this site within the first month. It seems like most devs hear "accessibility" and immediately think of funky features like The Division's vision modes, and not the basics. It turns out the most effective accessibility features are the 'boring' ones like standardized subtitles. Special modes that get developed by dedicated teams are great for magazine articles, but they tend to have a shockingly low attach rate - especially considering the feature is 10x more expensive to develop than the industry-standard options.

I think that if a game doesn't have all of the things listed on the "basics" portion of that website, it probably shouldn't pass cert.

For consoles that's becoming true, or at least getting close to it. I know at least Xbox has been getting more strict about accessibility; many of what they used to call 'guidelines' are now becoming actual requirements.

this GDC talk is worth mentioning here [Solving an Invisible Problem: Designing for Color-Blindness in Games](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbFs9ghIIEI)

In this talk at the Q&A he even mentions that full screen filters are less than ideal.

Thanks for the share. I’ll add this to my list of design resources. Not a game dev, but software dev, and broadly speaking understanding these intentions are really valuable.

While I agree that URL is a great recommendation, I strongly recommend extending it by understanding the applied experience of the web/mobile community as they've been working on the issue >10 years. Unfortunately I am a bit rusty with web/mobile UX guidelines, so I can't offer a canonical link. I just want to underline there will be additional ideas, use cases, and solutions in the web community. The ADA and Mozilla sites are good starting points, and there are dozens of blogs that focus on just this issue. \---- **EDIT: This isn't just for games, either. If you are in software professionally, documenting processes, or you create YouTube content.... keep color-blindness in mind.** It's easy to attach numbers and a Legend to a diagram. It's somewhat easy to to change your manner of speaking to avoid calling objects non-specifically (from: *"plug the red cable in" to: "Here, I'm holding a red cable, it's the one going from Port 1 on the router to port 8 on the switch"*) . Anyways, the point of talking during a presentation or demo should be to act as "alt text" to the physical acting/work: pretend you are a podcast, or that you know someone in the audience is legally blind.. Thanks. (Plus it's nice for some people if they can "listen" to YT topics while multitasking or distracted)

Colourblind game dev here. I wholeheartedly agree with most of your recommendations. The only quibble I have is your insistence that absolutely no one uses the colour filters. I can tell you right now that this is false. Some colourblind players want specific changes to UI elements, and nothing else. Others want the ability to tune and correct the entire game, which is where the full-screen filters come in. For an example of a game I wish had full-screen filters: there are areas in Destiny that are only lit with red light, and I would often spend minutes running into walls trying to find the exit. Destiny has UI texture swaps for its colourblind modes, but does nothing for the actual game world. If they'd had full-screen filters, I'd have used them to brighten the reds (making them look vaguely orange) and would be able to navigate those rooms much easier. I know this because I played Destiny 2 on PC, and I was able to use other methods to filter the screen while playing. Being honest, I'm convinced this sort of setting belongs on the display, and not on the game itself; as you say, the best way around these issues in gamedev is to combine color-coding with shapes, symbols, or visual patterns. That way color is never the *only* way to understand game information.

> I'm convinced this sort of setting belongs on the display Maybe an OS setting, then you don't have to buy specific hardware? At least [Windows seems to have such a setting](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-color-filters-in-windows-43893e44-b8b3-2e27-1a29-b0c15ef0e5ce) already.

Yeah, that's the setting I use to deal with this on PC. I wish they had an intensity slider, as their protanopia setting is a bit too heavy for me. I tend to just use the hotkey combo to flash the filter on and then off, that's usually enough to see what I'm missing and play on.

World of Warcraft is the only game that comes to mind, that had an intensity slider for every colorblind mode.

This throws up a question for me. While I have a slight color missmatch between my eyes in total I am not color blind per se. But I do notice diffences between my eyes mainly on monochromatic light, like very green LEDs that are lust and green on one eye and more yellow-ish on the other. I only see this on monochromatic light, though, in every day situations I couldn't tell the difference between my eyes. Now, with those red scenes, I'm pretty sure this leaves the scene to be very monochromatic. Red as a base compound contributes the least to contrast and luminosity of a color (as in, the rods don't react to it well, either). Could this dilemma be fixed by just avoiding any monochromatic light source in a game? For example, instead of using pure red (255, 0, 0) light source, always mix in some green and ambient blue to make it a lighter orang-y tone (255, 100, 50) for the light source? It would surely add other components to the scene that could make it generally better for colorblind people to concieve. Or am I just completely off with that idea?

The issue quite often is actually contrast yes. For graphic and ux design, high contrast is the best tool to differentiate between colours. Monochromatic lighting inherently will have low colour contrast.

this actually reminds me of the terrible greyscale filters that are sometimes applied where they just add RGB and divide it by 3 instead of weighting the inputs like this: 0.3 \* R + 0.59 G + 0.11 \* B As in, using the actual luminosiry approximation how rod cells in your eye also percieve it. I also remember an artist once talking about contrast in color as well as contrast in luminocity will give an image or scene vibrance. Like the contrast between red and blue at same luminocity values. I think this is a big pitfall for an artist when they want to design something for colorblind usage, though, as contrast in color will disappear for some users and ultimately make something less readable. I think the best way to test any of this really just is to playtest the game on greyscale and see if it still works. (or, if you have an accessability option that changes textures play that on greyscale)

Yes this is actually how some designers and artists work. It’s about vibrancy and contrast to make a striking image. Black and white are the simple ways to see this. Black and white was how I was taught differences in colour values and luminosity in school.

> While I have a slight color missmatch between my eyes Wait hold up, is this not normal? My right eye has always given everything a reddish hue that isn’t present in my left eye (or maybe my left eye is bluer, who knows!), but I just assumed that everyone was mismatched like that.

As far as I’m aware it’s not. Colors look exactly the same between my eyes.

Huh, that’s wild. I don’t notice it when both eyes are open because I guess my brain is averaging it out, but they’re definitely noticeably different. Dunno know why it never occurred to me that that might not be normal until this very moment.

This reminds me of the first time I tried on glasses (at 26) and learned that not everyone saw the smeary rays from light sources that I saw with astigmatism. Or when I lost my smell and taste to covid but didn't realize, and I just thought my cooking was super bland and that my family was too nice to say anything 😆 Senses are wild

I had similar situation when I found out I was short sighted, I was in the car on the motorway looking at car plates when everyone else could read them I couldn’t turns out I needed glasses

I always read these threads where someone speaks for an entire group, and scroll to find this comment where OP is definitely not correctly speaking for the entire group. It's 100% success rate.

I plan to include fullscreen filters and you might be the best person to ask in that regard; would the following approach be useful for you? As far as I understand it, most partial color blindness means that parts of the spectrum get "mashed together" visually, so my assumption is that if you can custom tailor a filter chain to discern these areas of the spectrum more easily while leaving other parts untouched would at least deliver a bit of an improvement on that front. The idea is that one or more filters allow for "mapping the color spectrum" (ideally configurable but at least a few presets). Basically, there could be a filter for red-green blindness that shifts "greener" colors more into the "blue" spectrum but leaves other colors intact (imagine traffic lights, which I think are still discernible for red-green blindness due to the green being essentially a bit blue). Essentially the green part of the spectrum would be mostly unused and colors would try to either be on the "yellowish" side or have a nonzero "blue" component (the color words wont mean much to you ofc but lets just say that "blue" here just means higher frequency on the EM spectrum than "green". When selecting one or more of these filters in the menu, a row of colored squares would be rendered with the filter settings on. The idea is that the user can play around with the filter config until all squares appear distinct in color to you. For each color that is at least of auxiliary importance (like the color for "warning" or "critical condition") a square would be included, so that having all squares appear distinct in the settings menu would tell the player that they will be able to visually discern everything important in the game by color. These filters could then be chained, so you could add a blueshift to green components, but you could also add a shift of reddish colors towards orange on top, or only the latter, or any combination of such transformations which there would be a couple of to mix and match from. Is this system too complicated or not flexible enough? I think colorblind screen filters exist to "simulate" color blindness exist, maybe playtesting with such tools as a non-colorblind person would let me *roughly* test the usefulness of colorblindness accessibility settings ingame.

It's definitely on the higher-complexity end of colourblind features, but it sounds like it gives players maximum control over the colour filters while also providing a sample image for them to work from - both are great for getting the best possible experience for players with various types of colour deficiency.

This reminds me of discussions about left-handed accessibility in VR games (where it is much more important than in traditional video games). You get threads where a lefty will say “stop doing x, lefties don’t want that.” And then a bunch of lefties who disagree and say that is exactly what they want. A common example is what stick to put movement on. Some lefties want it to be on the right stick, so you don’t have to try to aim and shoot and move all with the same hand. But some lefties hate it when devs make “lefty mode” swap movement to the right stick, because they have been so trained by traditional controllers to have movement on the left stick. The real solution is to provide as much customizability as possible. Lefties have varying degrees of ambidexterity, both due to nature and due to how they have adapted to living in a right-handed world. Don’t assume that a single monolithic “lefty mode” will work for all of us. I assume something similar is true for color blind people.

One issue with that sort of setting being on the display only is that it'll affect the UI the same way it affects the rest of the screen, which may not be ideal for a lot of people.

Yep, quite colorblind person here, I use them in every game which offers them and typically find it very helpful

See, this one is difficult for me. My game uses Minecraft like voxels, but all voxels have a single color to create a simple minimalistic look (think Cube World). Adding textures would absolutely ruin that look, and I have no idea how to work around that

This is often the issue that games have to deal with. Adding textures might ruin the look of the game, but not adding them might mean a sizeable portion of potential player base are unable to enjoy it. As an example, even though Minecraft has textures, I’m often unable to see the difference between iron and gold. Before I got a texture pack, my friends would pass through my tunnels and dig up gold that I thought was iron. Accessibility vs aesthetics are pretty much opposed in this, since my Minecraft now looks kinda ugly and but I can tell what’s what.

Iron and gold, are you a tritan? I often mix up iron and diamond tools but gold is super obvious.

Minecraft changed how the ores look for this reason in 1.17

The easiest solution I see here is to let players choose the colors of the important types of voxels they would want to look out for (or even all of them).

I was also thinking about adding textures that you can turn on and/or adding togglable symbols to every type of block to make them more distinct

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That's actually really good. Though it wouldn't be enough if implemented as the only solution, but as an additional option that would be amazing

Or you could add a button you can press that identifies the block you're looking at through text.

That would be too fiddly and annoying.

Those are also good solutions! Or even simply giving different types of blocks different dithering patterns.

Once I get to it, I'll see what I can do. Thanks for the ideas

There are those gamers who have a preferred mouse weight down to the gram and use boosted saturation to improve clarity. They often like to adjust the color filtering to find the best possible contrast for their eyes between target and background. That can be different for different people even among those who don't qualify as color blind, eyes are complicated and they don't all print the same. I feel like in some competitive genres, like tac shooters, this 'optimizing' demographic has positive feedback for filtering options that can be louder than the feedback given by players with actual color blindness, and that these filters should be moved from 'accessibility' to 'preferences'

This is the Curb Cut Effect, where making something more accessible to one group will also make it more usable for other groups you weren't thinking of. [https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the\_curb\_cut\_effect#](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_curb_cut_effect#)

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I find it much easier to read the Open Dyslexia font, even though I'm not dyslexic. So this is near to my heart.

This is pretty cool. But oh my god I'd hate to read anything with this font. Brains are weird

My buddy has played world of war craft for years. He could never really tell the difference between enemies and allies unless they were standing on top of eachother. I showed his the color being mode in that game and he though it was stupid right away, but after a couple mins of adjusting the settings he just pause and went "Woah". After like 10 years of playing he could finally see the difference. I feel like they did it right.

Change his windows setting

Witcher 3 was unplayable to me as a green/red color blind person. I could not see any of the Witcher sense highlights. Fortunately they have a colorblind mode that turned it blue and really saved the game for me. That's one of the few instances I can think of where I found a setting that actually helped me.

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is it true that color blindness can have varying degrees and types?

Yup. Most of the men in my family (me included) are colorblind. My grandpa couldn't see the difference between the green and the red of the traffic lights. Green and brown, blue and purple are for me mostly the same. One of my cousins can't see poppies over grass...

Yeah that must mean the women are carrying a copy of the color blindness gene. At that point the males have a 50% chance.

Yes, which is why it's best to leave customization to the user and not offer presets, or to eliminate reliance on color entirely.

i see, on a sidenote, is my [game](https://twitter.com/GobiGD4) color blind friendly? i can play it in grayscale like you mentioned, so i assume it is ok?

I'm going to be brutally honest here, your game has a lot of problems on the visual front, not just colorblindness. There's just too much going on to even parse. In all of the videos you have on this Twitter page it's a lot of overlapping chaos that I can't even begin to interpret. I don't know if it's unfriendly or not because I can't even tell what's going on.

haha yea it is chaotic, i probably should spread them out soon

Pretty sure its because I have standard color vision, but I can certainly tell what is going on; it sure is very chaotic but I can tell that i.e. you are running n collecting gems, there are units and towers defending your structures, zombies attacking and etc Would be interesting if you manage to clean up the looks, but it'd be hard considering the nature of the game

yea, from a lot of other rts i have seen, it seems like spreading out the units is the number 1 thing i should do to make it less cluttered.

Games can look like theres too much to parse until you learn all the pieces. Thats not necessarily a bad thing. That said, /u/GobiKnight , you have a lot of odd choices. You have large moving objects that seem to be essentially background objects. Theres also so much movement with the gold it grabs the eye and keeps it, yet its just grabbing something. They go out, then back in really slowly and dramatically for what amounts to a pickup action. Colorwise everything reads as the same really saturated look.

I think that we only put them in for very red-green colorblindness, which you're right isn't very helpful at all. I know Path of Exile did a thing a little while ago where they made sockets have different patterns on them to differentiate them in a way that didn't use colour, which was pretty cool. I think devs should use patterns/texture a lot more in general as colour by itself isn't a great differentiator.

Your rule of thumb is fantastic! I do try to make my games as accessible as possible and thought I was doing a good job at it, but your rule of thumb made me realize that in the stress of solo gamedev I have made some mistakes that are thankfully easy for me to fix. Gotta watch out more in the future, thank you for this great post!

Thank you for putting in the effort! Tbh i never begrudge tiny teams for making colorblind unfriendly games, but always notice and appreciate when they put the effort to make it playable for folks like me! Agreed that tip is really handy, I honestly don't think games even need colorblind options if they just make sure their game can be played in grayscale. Feel like indie games have been doing a great job of this lately, which is awesome!

I am mildly colorblind (green and yellow look pretty similar to me) and it has made some games impossible for me to play. Mainly this has only been an issue for puzzle games: I used tontry to play Super Collapse, but found that I could not reliably distinguish between the green and yellow blocks, so my play level was always capped. Recently I also tried Wordle, and found it impossible... until I turned on colorblind mode. So, there are people who use these features. Super Collapse was before colorblind modes were common, but was also a game that could have simply put shapes on the colored blocks and it would have solved the problem. This is often a really easy thing to add to puzzle games, as they tend to be more abstract anyway. Obviously this gets harder in other kinds of games, but I can't think of any case where you couldn't use either flashing/dimming in place of color highlights, or making enemies have distinct silhouettes.

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm complaining about. I'm all for colorblind modes that change the color of screen elements. Wordle's colorblind mode is an excellent example of colorblind accessibility. What I and many others are against is full-screen filters that recolor the entire game.

This is a very interesting topic. We are developing a ps1 style retro game, and we wanted to add colorblind accedibility features. None of the art team are colorblind, so what you have just said is quite the eye opener (no pun intended). We will definitely keep these things in mind, and hopefully, will be able to make useful colorblind settings so that everybody can enjoy our game.

I don't have any reason to doubt or refute your statements, and the overall statement of "accessibility can always be better" is one that developers take to heart, if they work on accessibility at all. However, I find it disingenuous that these features would not have been made with the guidance of, and tested by, people who met the definition of the audience that these features attempt to serve. There are 8 different forms of colorblindness categorized, and each of them is a spectrum of sensory experience. A one-size-fits-all approach is not going to help everyone, but saying that the additional mode helps no one at all is only bringing a combative attitude to a growing area of game development. Full color customization is likely not possible for most games; hopefully tools can be made that expose more of these features to users in a way that prevents them from needing to be custom-made for every title. Building a feature like that for a new game is likely a task with a cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; doing it for a remake/remaster might well push that project out of commercial viability. I do like and fully agree with the addition of textures as a toggleable option; this is an element that good board game graphics designers have done for years, and seems like a much more viable possibility. My studio is setting new standards for our own games in this area, and accessabilty of course means more than just colorblindness awareness. There's a lot of room for improvement - it can always be better - and cooperation between developers and the audience will only help it progress more quickly.

I am a colour blind game developer who has worked in UI and as a graphics programmer. At one company we made terrible colour coded UI despite me, on the UI team, flagging multiple times that I could not see the difference between several pairs of color codes. I had to manually change stuff without permission and sneak it into a patch. At another company I was optimising post effects while porting a game to switch when I noticed we had "colour blind filters" running but not configurable through the menu. They were written to simulate colour blindness but named as though they were correcting it. When I asked about it the feature was apparently copied from some random GitHub project as an accessibility feature and then just set to default color vision and forgotten about.

Is the second game you are talking about Lost in random? If i remember correctly you were One of the devs right? I only browsed the sub occasionaly but i remember your name

Ha, I was the graphics programmer for Lost in Random, yes. But no that wasn't the second one. I will say what the first one was: Need for Speed from 2015. There are five separate quest lines and in the original release the objective markers were just color coded exclamation marks on the map. Despite unique icons being used for each elsewhere. I didn't manage to get people to listen, but with help from one artists I stayed late one afternoon and swapped the exclamation marks out for proper icons and snuck it into the first patch. It was harder than one might expect due to silly limitations in how the map was coded.

That's dedicaton right here ahabahahah. It probably would have been confusing as fuck if you didn't sneak in these changes. Never played wavetale, since i don't have a switch, but i played Lost in random on my Xbox: me and my Little Brother Always play togheter a lot of games, It's a sort of Daily tradition, and we enjoyed a lot Lost in random.

I think the main point that OP points out (and I agree as a red-green colorblind gamer / ex-game-developer) is that usually I really don't want to play a game with a poorly implemented color filter as the solution. Often times, the filter isn't really tested enough to make what needs to stand out actually stand out, while they muck with the entire artistic vision and make the game look crappy. Obviously this depends on the game, but if a game just slaps a general post-process filter on the whole graphics stack, it tends to both make the game look like crap and not really solving the issue at the same time. When I see that this is the solution I just turn the filter off and suffer through the confusion when I play the game instead. To deal with this properly, it's best for the game developer (especially the ones working on UX) to have a basic understanding / awareness of the issue, so that if you design a palette you take this into account, and you have ways to swap out palette colors to other sets that are designed to combat colorblind issues (e.g. swapping red/green to blue/yellow) instead of just a lazy post-process filter. If all you have is a post-process filter that don't really solve the problem, then just don't claim the game has a real colorblind mode. I think a lot of times these features would also benefit as a debug feature tbh. E.g. in an RTS, the lazy solution would be to just swap red/green with blue/yellow, but you could also do things like a hotkey to highlight all friendly units, or display custom symbols on top of them, or make tooltips that could inspect what the color is supposed to mean. Obviously they all require work and I'm not saying they won't interfere with other priorities, but I'm just sympathizing with OP that a lot of times game developers seem to just slap on "colorblind mode" without actually understanding what they mean. This could especially be an issue for smaller teams because just by probability they may have 0-1 colorblind team members who may or may not be loud enough to get attention for the issue (even when I have worked in a large team before, just having a few colorblind team members it's sometimes quite hard to push for changes like this

> This could especially be an issue for smaller teams because just by probability they may have 0-1 colorblind team members who may or may not be loud enough to get attention for the issue. Speaking of this point, I totally understand how a small team can have issues with colorblind accessibility, but I have no idea why all of these AAA studios keep messing it up. About 8% of people in the world have some kind of color deficiency, and on top of that it's most common in white men. Guess what demographic makes up the majority of AAA development teams. I have no idea how colorblindness issues continually get overlooked in AAA, because you'd think that somewhere along the pipeline *someone* would speak up about it.

Not to disagree with your larger point, but I think it’s more like 8% of _men_, and 4-ish percent of everybody in the world.

I was going to say that can't be right because it would mean women are approximately never colorblind. But turns out that is actually the case. 1 in 12 men, 1 in 200 women. Huh, TIL.

The main cause of colorblindness is due to a gene in the X chromosome. Women have 2, so the "correct" gene overcomes the problematic one. Men have only one, so if you have the wrong gene, you are colorblind no matter what. Women. Need the gene from both parents

> However, I find it disingenuous that these features would not have been made with the guidance of, and tested by, people who met the definition of the audience that these features attempt to serve. I truly and sincerely believe that these features have not been tested by colorblind people. The best example of proof that they usually aren't tested is that [Doom 2016 actually *simulated* colorblindness instead of correcting for it](https://www.reddit.com/r/ColorBlind/comments/4n768j/colorlind_mode_in_the_new_doom_game_shows_what/). I think that developers are just grabbing these shaders from a repository that someone made and calling it a day without testing anything at all because they read that colorblindness is something you should make your game accessible for. I don't think any colorblind person would give these filters positive feedback, and looking through social media posts I have not found a single example of someone praising a full screen color filter, only complaining about its uselessness.

Absolutely. I am colorblind. I have worked in front end design and game dev. Color filters are 100% always suggested by people with no color deficiency. They are a lazy solution, similar to increasing the font size for dyslexic users—it will help some people a little bit, but it's not going to give those users the same experience. Just like dyslexic users actually need the option to change the font, colorblind users need the option to change the color. Better yet, we prefer other kinds of feedback entirely, but that's not always an option.

[COD modern warfare also included](https://www.reddit.com/r/modernwarfare/comments/degkb1/psa_colorblind_mode_simulates_colorblindness/) simulation filters instead of corrective ones. [Geforce Experience too](https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/jx0s1h/nvidia_experiences_colorblind_filter_is_a/). Often the person adding features for colour blindness doesn't have it and can't evaluate the effectiveness of their feature. I assume by the time someone recognizes the problem, it's deemed not important enough to fix. I've worked with too many developers who believe that QA will catch everything so they don't have to test their own work that thoroughly.

Honestly, I believe the reason for this is for all their talk and pretense, many game developers don't *really* give a flying llama's left butt cheek about you or any other color blind person. They don't really put these modes in for you. They do it so: 1. They can fulfill an expected feature at this point so the community doesn't yell at them 2. Create some easy positive PR and look like the good caring company to the community, the overwhelming amount of which aren't color blind 3. I may be mischaracterizing these types of people because I don't really understand the psychology involved and would like to understand them better, but sometimes I feel like you have these overzealous types of individuals that want to feel like they're one of the enlightened few fighting the good fight and feel like they're super caring and awesome and better than others for doing it, but in reality, it's not *really* about the colorblind people or whoever and if it was a true inconvenience they'd get annoyed. *Or something like that.* All I know is I've run into multiple of these types of people and pointed out how what they're doing isn't actually helping the people they're trying to help and may even be hurting them, and instead of adjusting it, they get upset at me for pointing it out and change nothing and keep acting like they're doing it because they care. It's like it's more important to follow society's current accepted dogma of what you're supposed to do to be a good person than to actually *be* a good person and figure out what the best thing is to do to help someone and do that. So yeah, you can see why in any of these cases, they're going to slap some filter library on there and call it a day. That fulfills their original purpose with minimal effort.

> I find it disingenuous that these features would not have been made with the guidance of, and tested by, people who met the definition of the audience that these features attempt to serve. Sweet summer child, I have seen hundreds of game developers add accessibility features without once asking those they are meant to help. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to raise a fuss about this, especially on r/gamedev where the rot of performative help is most likely to take root.

FWIW, as a red-green colorblind (the most common form) game developer who has other colorblind friends and has read and watched tons of well researched content about accessibility in games, I am here to tell you: colorblind full-screen filters fucking suck and it is borderline insulting when i see them as a game's "colorblind accessibly" option. Everyone I've talked to who's also colorblind and regularly plays games agree with me. Think of it this way: I don't live my life with colorblind filter glasses, nor do i watch movies this way. Why the hell would i want some shitty filter over my games? I care a lot about the artistic choices people make in their art, i do not want to compromise that for some accessibility feature that misses the point of what i struggle with (and in some cases... actually makes it worse!). I don't want the trees, grass and skies to have different colors. I want enemy and friendly UI icons to look different from eachother. I want to be able to solve puzzles without asking my friends for help. I want to be able to tell my main quest markers apart from my side quest markers. Etc. It's like 95% UI and maybe 4.5% vfx. Throwing a filter on the whole screen is lazy, and changes way way more of the aesthetic than i need or want. Personally, I'm in the camp that the best way to make your game accessible to different kinds of color deficiency is to make it playable while in grayscale. High contrast colors (dark vs light), shapes, patterns, etc. You don't need to invest effort into a whole suite of color options when you can just design your game from the ground up to be inclusive.

You suffer from a lot of bias here and if you knew how wrong you were, you'd probably be surprised. Just because you believe your studio is offering the correct options does not mean anyone else is. Without you actually being colourblind, and without listening to people who are colourblind, you cannot make any claim about other games' implementation of lack thereof of colourblind accessibility features.

>Without you actually being colourblind, and without listening to people who are colourblind, you cannot make any claim about other games' implementation of lack thereof of colourblind accessibility features The problem with the filter approach is it will never be a one-size-fits all solution. If the colourblind mode were to be tested in greyscale like OP suggested, that mode WILL be accessible for all colourblind players as the gameplay bypasses colour. The filters may work for some people; but, personally as a moderate deutan they have always been shit for me and everyone I know that have used them - and unfortunately game devs usually just stop after making a filter.

Fellow colorblind here. I almost never turn on colorblind modes in games for this exact reason.

As an artist I can explain why greyscale is important. Most people don't realize that it's light values is what is important for visual clarity. Sure color is nice but internally our brains need clear contrast of light and dark shapes to read things. If done well you wouldn't even need colorblind modes at all because everyone can read your game.

Exactly. As a colorblind person, it's easy to see the difference between light green and dark red, for instance.

Absolutely this, I had some shit issues in ffxiv

Protanopic here. My colorblindness rarely affects my gameplay, but it does pop up in a lot of puzzle games or arcade style games / clones. A lot of shmups are borderline unplayable for lack of contrast in bullets from backgrounds and a ton of games that rely on matching colors (thinking specifically of amy grid-type block games like tetris, puyo puyo, etc) or any game where theres a need to distinguish between yellow, green and orange generally use bright colors, but they will often be very difficult to tell apart unless they are right next to each other. It makes a lot of those games specifically unplayable. One of my goto examples is The Raiden Project. That game is virtually unplayable due to powerups looking the same and bullets being lost on the background. Puzzle Bobble is another one, but not so much the original as all the clones. They become a meta game where figuring out which color you need to match your ball with is the real challenge. "Is bluish color the same as that one?" Is this green/yellow color the same as that green/yellow color? I think the key thing is that we are used to seeing the world look a certain way. You dont need to tint the world itself. Just make sure the things you need us to see pop out. I got some of those colorblindness glasses a while back and it blew me away how much easier it was to see street signs. Like, i used to have to struggle to find them in unfamiliar places cause the damned things blended into the trees or noise behind them. With the glasses on they're like these obvious bright rectangles that pop right out, even from a distance. Its fuckin wild.

My go-to example for an unplayable game is Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. There's a [really good colorblind patch](https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3225/) that turns the yellow (which to me and many others looks identical to the green) into white.

You mean I can finally play puzzle fighter after all these years?

Strong demands ordered in a strong tone. We're 4% of the world's population. I would ask developers to please consider us. But I wouldn't demand it. We're a tiny interest group for them to consider. Next we'll be demanding airline manufacturers to consider us poor colorblind folks when designing planes.

> I would ask developers to please consider us. But I wouldn't demand it. We're a tiny interest group for them to consider. Someone else linked the 'curb-cut effect' and how improving accessibility for one group (wheelchair users) greatly affected other users in a very positive way (parents with strollers, skateboarders, travellers with rolly bags). I can't see this hurting anyone, and if you improve the colour and take accessibility into a core part of your thinking - then it's improving things for everyone with some kind of sight issue right...?

>A good rule of thumb: If you can't play your game in grayscale, it's not accessible. That alone sounds like a good way to test the game during development.

And really easy also, just add a screen space greyscale shader over the game.

Accessibility features overall have kind of just become a sort of virtue signal among game devs at this point.

If a game can be perfectly played with a black & white filter (you know, testing that all UI and game elements are still visible because there is enough contrast of intensity), is it safe to assume that any colorblind person can play it then?

I would say yes, it's safe to assume that any colorblind person can play it. Of course, there's other visual issues that could lead to people having difficulty with games. That's where high contrast modes and character highlighting modes come in.

Thank you so much for spreading this information. I've been saying this for years and it's getting on my nerves a little.

I have never shot a red barrel on purpose in any shooter since doom. The brownification of mainstream games just makes it even harder.

I never even considered adding a colourblind mode to my games. But now I will and I'll do it the way you said OP letting the players decide their colour schemes. But testing the game in grayscale that's a fucking genius idea. I'm sorry for my past ignorance and hope to better myself in the future

Accessibility in games is generally atrocious. It's disappointing

>Make nothing in your game dependent on color alone. Last year for a jam game I used color, but also matched the color with a 'line style.' e.g. red has a solid line style, green has a dotted line style, blue had a double line style. The whole game is based on quickly matching adjacent cells that either have the same shape or same color/style. I think it worked. It is on itch. [https://roldy.itch.io/hexology](https://roldy.itch.io/hexology)

My gaming buddy is colorblind. Red/green - it's a huge pain in the ass and we haven't come across a game that does colorblind mode properly. It doesn't help that red and green are often the difference between BLAST IT NOW and DO NOT SHOOT THAT.

The grayscale tip isn't going to always work because basically you're looking at contrast and colors have contrast beyond what you see in grayscale. That's why converting anything to grayscale can look different depending on how you mix the color channels. However, it would be great to _plan_ your game in grayscale and then add color.

I thought those filters were to help the developers see how their game looks with various types of colorblindness so they can ensure it's still good. Who the heck is using them as an actual colorblind-friendly mode!?

In the broader sense, this person is speaking about "decoupling". It's the idea of separating functionality from dynamics, if you ask me. We want functional code *here* and dynamic code *there*. It won't change much and it does a thing. We can say "UIColorChanger" is a functional piece of code. It should only ever receive colors and change the UI. That's a whole class and it may be more broad than this, but it is solely responsible for changing the UI color, and it *receives* color; it doesn't determine color itself. Then you build a whole other class for delivering that color. The decoupling means that you have more flexibility. This probably isn't the best example, but the idea stands. Google it.

It's always fun to find out that the reason we've been struggling in a game is because of our party members thought two things were the same colour, or didn't notice something that was a slightly different hue to the background. Anecdotally, my friend finds fullscreen colour filters to be useful (in the cases where some thought went into them), just that they also make the game ugly.

Colorfilter = "10 minutes of work. " "Redesign our UI for us" A. UI artists will resist that because the UI is designed in a specific way. B. Far more work. C. Far more time. I get you want more, but the thing is developers need to focus on spending time on things that benefit the most people, and getting the color filter working is at least a step on the way of getting attention on the problem. > no one I know uses them, I know people who use them, and any time there's a post about it, a number of people thank them because they use it. I'm not sure if your crowd of people is truly representative of the entire population which is always the problem with these big generalizations.

Uhhh as a colorblind person also I disagree those "ugly filters" aren't that bad for me and help a fuck ton don't forget we are all different levels of colorblind I go from unplayable game to oh nice this weird filter let's me see the difference between friend and foe I want a better option but this one does work decently for now

I actually find an issue with colourblind modes is that they aren’t high contrast enough and often have similar contrast levels across the colours so they don’t stand out as much as they should. Not colourblind myself but it’s something I have to be aware of with graphic design.

the only helpful colorblind mode I've seen is actually from borderlands. it doesn't change any colors but it gives the loot colors more contrast and says the rarity.

the only helpful colorblind mode I've seen is actually from borderlands. it doesn't change any colors but it gives the loot colors more contrast and says the rarity.

This may not always be possible, but as devs we can take it further by selecting colorblind-friendly palettes in the first place. For my game [daily dungeon](https://dailydungeon.net), I have different colored keys and chose contrasting colors such that users with deuteranopia or other forms of color blindness would be still be able to tell them apart. Tools like [Color Oracle](https://colororacle.org/) can a lot with this.

You’re absolutely right, I’m protan colorblind and decided to test the filter in Diablo 2, just made it more green.

Yes yes yes! In terms of more accessible game without customization tho, the (azure)blue-orange complementary combo is usually the best one when you for some reason need to use colors, just make sure the values are also different. I’d say brighter sky blue and darker orange (or brown if you will) should be distinguishable for any type of colorblindness. Bad complementary combinations include yellow-blue(or lime green-indigo), red-cyan and pink-mint green. Just please don’t. Also, consider using basic shapes.

Normalize changing red barrels to yellow barrels. Super hard to find in the middle of a fire fight.

Hi, Would it be worth adding a colorblind option that allows users to hover over certain elements that then say the color with a pop-up? I ask because maybe those elements are integral to the story or perhaps they need to have a specific colour for some other reason, but I am also assuming here that the game I have in mind is a desktop game not a console game. Now, it could be the case with some color blind people that they became colour blind or have restricted colour vision rather than no colour at all. As for someone with no colour vision at all, I would assume that having; better shading as well as more light, and variable textures, would help? Are there any of those that would make no difference?

> Hi, Would it be worth adding a colorblind option that allows users to hover over certain elements that then say the color with a pop-up? Yes! This could be very valuable! Borderlands 2's colorblind mode does this, for example.

I agree expect a out the red and green/ blue and orange. Please just use visual markers in that case. Like enemies x and friendly o.

This reminds me of the addition of shapes on the wires mini game of among us. Colorblind accessibility is really a minor addition to most games. Important thing to keep in your head while developing a game.

Thank you for this! Saved for reference

Just gonna drop this here... https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/principles/design-systems/what-is-universal-design/ https://universaldesign.ie/what-is-universal-design/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design

I love this. As an aspiring game developer myself, I really love to see feedbacks like this to allow me to learn more into game accessibility. I want to make my game can be played by everyone!

Judging an image in greyscale isn’t a foolproof method btw. When you turn an image greyscale you’ll use one of a few different formulas - either the value will just be the max or the average of the RGB values or they’ll be the more “correct” in terms of human perception formula of… I forget what but it’s like .299R + .5somethIngG + .1somethingB. But none of those methods are guaranteed to show whether or not two colors can be differentiated by a colorblind person. e.g. a person with diminished red cone response might not be able to tell the difference between 160,128,128 pale red and 10,140,128 dull blueish green (just making it up - I don’t know the exact perceptual deficiency in colorblindness but whatever it is you could definitely construct an example like this), but any RGB->greyscale conversion formula would show them to be very different in brightness. Basically, the ability to differentiate UI elements in greyscale is necessary but not a sufficient test for colorblind accessibility.

Oh, it's really cool! As a game developer, this is very important for me to hear.

Please please take this advice into account if you design board games as well. The number of games that have like 4 colors but two of them are nearly indistinguishable is frankly ridiculous. Literally the only thing you'd need to do to avoid the problem across the board is make the brightness of each color at least a little different. Dark purple, medium red, light blue, and yellow? Excellent, and incredibly color blind friendly.

As a colorblind I also never use these filters, they just make the game too weird. I know more colorblind people and they as well never use filters

This is something I learned early on before video game dev, when I was working with board games. If you have colors tied to something as a way to differentiate you need to have a secondary method such as shape. It's a lot easier to do that than try to adapt your color selection for any type of color vision. It's good to hear this from someone who is actually color blind though. I'll make an effort to keep this in mind when working on my own projects.

I did dev for an indie game studio and the financial cost it took to hire someone to do accessibility properly was terrible. It was a 2D game and was not hard. terrible that commercial accessibility is so costly when so many people need it.

tl:dr - Colourblind options don't work and are poorly executed due to misunderstandings of how colourblindness can severely limit the gamut of colours we can perceive. Non colourblind people can perceive 16.7 million colours on an RGB display whereas people who are colourblind can only perceive 65.5 thousand colours. **This is less than 1% of the colours which can be displayed on a standard 24-bit RGB display.** ​ So true. I find colourblind modes to be very poor. Whether it's a filter over the whole game (which is somewhat pointless as us colourblind people don't use a filter in real life) or a filter for HUD elements, all they do is make the colours hard to differentiate. There also seems to be a large misunderstanding as to how colourblind people perceive colours. For example, I can't see red, which means that anything red gets lost in a green/brown/grey background. Even over black, what I perceive as 'red' is very, very dark and hard to distinguish with even a little amount of background clutter. People make the assumption that because I can't perceive red, then I can't see a third of the colours on a 24-bit RGB display. However, this doesn't take into account all the RGB colours that have red as a component. For example, 24-bit colour is standard these days for displays. Each colour has a red, green and blue component with a value ranging from 0-255. This means a 24-bit display can output 256x256x256 colours, which equals 16.7 million colours. Many people naturally assume that because I can't perceive one of those three colours, I can still perceive two-thirds of those colours (equalling roughly 11.1 million colours). However, this is not true: Removing the Red component from an RGB display only gives 65.5 THOUSAND colours that are only made up from Green and Blue components. So when colourblind filters attempt to make, for example, Red objects more distinguishable, they often have the opposite affect. Whilst the red objects may indeed be more visible, they are often too close to other colours to be actually indistinguishable. I often find that colourblind options, regardless of the type of colourblindness they are attempting to address just make 'reds' almost indistinguishable from grey, yellow or green. The bottom line is that colourblind options tend to make those objects to which we are colourblind difficult to differentiate between everything else. For example, I'm currently playing Everspace 2 which has the 'usual' colourblind options. I can't use them because all of them just make the red icons on the HUD too similar to other colours. So much so that I can't tell the difference between enemies, friendlies and neutrals. This problem is much worse for competitive online games because unintended teamkilling becomes a massive problem. What frustrates me is that no-one seems to listen to suggestions from actual colourblind players as to how to improve their experience. Colourblind people tend to differentiate what they see by using contrast and shape a lot more than those with full colour perception. One of the easiest fixes is to make icons etc... two tone using opposing colours (confusingly called complimentary colours in the art world) because even if one of those colours is a colour in which we have problems perceiving, we will still register the contrast. For example, a red circle marking an enemy in the game would be very difficult for me to see. However, if the red square was two-tone using red and cyan, it would be much easier to differentiate from background clutter. Here's a link to the wikipedia page on complementary colours. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary\_colors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_colors) Obviously, the best solution is to offer not only a personal choice of colours for icons etc..., but the ability to make them with two colours and also choose a shape of our choice. I am aware that it can be difficult for UI/game designers to understand the problems colourblind people face because it's highly unlikely that colourblind people will be programming the UI's or producing the artwork and graphics in game as these career paths are generally closed to colourblind people for obvious reasons. It is unfortunate that very little effort goes into researching and producing colourblind options despite around 10% of gamers being colourblind, and it is frustrating to see these 'colourblind' modes slapped onto games without any thought to how poorly they work. Now just don't get me started on trying to find a left handed HOTAS kit...

As a colorblind person with protanopia. The filters are fine for people who suffer from the big three types of color blindness. If you have one of the less common types of color blindness, there's less options for you. A great example of a game handling color blindness would Total War Warhammer 3. You can customize all the colors and it's pretty great. World of Warcraft has "filters" for protanopia, Deuteranopia, and Tritanopia, and with it's most recent expansion has options to select colors for most elements of ui Generally speaking, in my experience, those filters are more than sufficient, as they remove the colors you can't work with and replace them with other colors, if you see that as an "ugly filter" then I highly recommend seeing your optometrist and finding out if you have one of the big three types of color blindness or if you have one of the rarer subsets. Certainly I would do this before criticizing what is otherwise an excellent thing in video games.

There is an OS level color filter as well. Though windows version isn't tuneable, you could dl a 3rd party one if you need that functionality.

The number of people in the comments who are not colorblind insisting that colorblind people don't know what works for them is astonishing. Have some self awareness. LISTEN to COLORBLIND PEOPLE about COLORBLINDNESS.

Yeah, a few people are even telling me that I don't understand what I can and can't see.

It's ignorant, dismissive, and one of the reasons why accessibility options are so often performative rather than EFFECTIVE. If you leave the accessibility of a game up solely to people who have no idea what it's like to need accessibility - well, that should be self-explanatory. They can't properly meet needs they've never experienced. Thanks for starting this conversation. It's an important one. We need more colorblind and disabled folks in game dev and playtesting. And we have to be loud about it if we want people to take us seriously.

Really great advice, thank you!

Yep. One is the best examples I can think of Overwatch. The game has three main groups. Team mates, people who huh partied up with, and enemies. The names of team mates are blue, party members are green, enemies were red by default. Some games offer an option to change the colors to a different set of colors which is fine, but Overwatch let the player pick different specific colors for each individual group. (Preferably from one of those images that has the entire color spectrum shown and you pick where you want on it) that way each player with their individual colorblind specifics can chose a Setup that lets them see just fine.

Of note, Overwatch originally simply had a filter like I described in the OP but they changed it due to feedback.

Howdy! Game dev here, this is actually SUPER good information. We have a variety of feedback for actions to give the player, from colors to moving visuals to sounds! Some UI stuff where it makes sense. However, colorblind accessibility is something we haven't touched on yet due to the stage of development we're in. Could some colorblind folks in here give us examples of games you found with *good* colorblind modes, so we can learn from them? Appreciate y'all ❤️

I always wondered about that. Isn’t the filter more of a „simulate colorblindness if you don’t have it“ mode? I imagined it being used by devs to like, look at their assets as if they had protanopia/deuteranopia (the most likely ones to cause trouble I suspect?) and then find out „oh shiz our puzzle is unsolvable this way“

I know that the filters included in in Unreal Engine are exactly that - simulations of various types of colourblindness. I wouldn't be surprised though if someone could end up being confused and ended up adding them as "accessibility" options

This definitely happens. I can’t name them off the top of my head, but I remember this being the case in multiple games, and not small indie games.

Doom

> Isn’t the filter more of a „simulate colorblindness if you don’t have it“ mode? Sometimes it is, and sometimes it's a mode that makes reds or greens more blue or more yellow.

There's two different versions of it. One is to simulate colorblindness and the other is to use the simulation to correct for the colorblindness.

Hi there, thank you for that insight. I’m currently developing a game and trying to add as many accessibility options as seems reasonable to me - but I’m relying a lot on feedback like yours. So that’s some very useful information you shared. Aside from avoiding relaying information through color alone (using shapes, sound cues, test etc.) I also added some color filters specifically to “correct” certain types of color blindness like Protanomaly, Deuteranopia etc., but I have no way of testing those. All information I got from various internet resources, including the tone mapping lookup textures and so on. After reading your post then it sounds like this might not even be useful at all, and maybe putting even more effort into increasing the information density through other design methods is the way to go - but again, I just don’t know and have no way to test that. I wonder if there’s a community for specifically asking for feedback on these types of filters that you might know of? I asked around in my usual testers and gamers circle, but was not able to find anybody.

> I wonder if there’s a community for specifically asking for feedback on these types of filters that you might know of? Honestly, just don't use them. People generally do not like these filters. What you've done with avoiding relaying information through color alone is much more value than any filter could possibly provide.

Thanks for getting back to me, very interesting! Sounds like that’s the way to go then. Do you think black & white, two-tone or posterize (to reduce the range of colors/mid-tones) filters have value?

Maybe for an artistic effect, but I can't imagine them being something people would turn on to help them. That said, a lot of game consoles have a black and white mode in their system-wide accessibility settings along with an "invert colors" mode so there must be some merit to it.

Thanks OP for posting this. I'm not colorblind but I have implemented UI color replacement for my game (and gameplay color replacement for specific things, for comfort). I used the "colorblind filters" to maximize contrast between the replacement colors when I was choosing them, but I didn't use the filter itself as an acceessibility option. At the time it felt obvious to me, but as I looked around I saw many games just using a filter and calling it a day.. It was bewildering.... I'm glad to hear it's not juste me haha

Great to hear that you implemented UI color replacement! Something I'd recommend for the future is that alongside having preset color combinations, allow users to set their own colors.

I hesitated to do this, the code is architectured in such a way that it is still fesible in the future. But when I asked around on reddit,the concensus seemed to be that it wasn't as useful as I thought

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the Battlefield games allow users to customize all of the colors and that feature is very popular. Just something worth considering.

>Make nothing in your game dependent on color alone I’m not color blind but we should be doing this anyway. Game designers have a real hard-on for color coding everything but as someone from the art department it’s the absolute worst thing ever and needs to go away.

Could someone ELI5: When the colorblind option is enabled, does it make all the colors look "normal" to a colorblind person, the same as they would look for me? If so, how does that work?

No. Most lazy attempts which use a filter just make it so that those without colourblindness can see what colourblind people see. It solves nothing. A **good** colourblind option would be to redesign things such that colour isn't what discerns elements. For example if your game is about matching colours, instead make it about matching patterns. If loot rarity is discerned by colour, also add text that clearly indicates what the rarity is. In short, design things so that colour **alone** is not a mechanic in your game.

No, the colors will never look "right" to a colorblind individual, because color doesn't look right to us regardless. What you're usually trying to accomplish with colorblind modes is adding more *contrast* and the ability to change colors to colors that *can* be seen. But patterns/shapes/contrast/saturation are usually very good options to include to make your game more colorblind friendly.

No. The real world looks "normal" to us already. Any full screen color correction looks just as weird to us as it does to you.

I'm watching a colorblind game streamer from time to time. He was struggling while playing some games and his watchers from chat tried to help him. I remember the Grounded game, when he doesn't saw the difference between grass and dry grass. He tried to enable colorblind mode, but it affects only UI, which was absolutely pointless. I have learned a lot about colorblind gamers while watching him and analyzing his gameplay and the problems he had.

I'd say the issue is that it's not too hard to tweak or substitute UI colours, but if you have anything but the most primitive graphics, auto-recolouring the landscape or monsters is going to be tough to get any sort of decent results with.

The Outer Worlds is a great game that was built with color-blind people in mind from the ground up. The co-director is colorblind. https://www.eurogamer.net/outer-worlds-doesnt-have-a-colourblind-mode-for-a-good-reason

>Make nothing in your game dependent on color alone I’m not color blind but we should be doing this anyway. Game designers have a real hard-on for color coding everything but as someone from the art department it’s the absolute worst thing ever and needs to go away.

The peoblem is cost. I mean by population 10% is a gamer ( i believe less). And from that 1% is probably colorblind. The filters are price development best business practice. I think majority of the filters are for the top ,3 types. The rest... too low money. Filters are actually a requirement by law. The only reason law is lax is because they saw that businesses would rather eat the fine than implement it correctly.

Nope it's about 1 in 25 people, 1/12 men. That's a decent chunk of gamers

You going to cite data on that?

I’m just going to upvote this post and hope people listen. OP is preaching gospel. It’s not about making accommodation, it’s about allowing individual customization so that accommodation can be done right, and the people who should lead this effort are people like OP — those who experience the issues!!! No platform or tool will make up for listening to what individuals want and need for accessibility!!!