Accessibility in 0 A.D.

[Zaggy1024]

Then it should be up to him to figure out what colors he'll recognize as colors others see (it's not like someone on a team would set settings that would lessen their ability to cooperate with their teammates).

[zoot]

If the colorblind guy says: "attack blue", how do I know whether he is referring to my blue or his blue? IMO it's not realistic to expect random noobs to agree on such things beforehand, and it creates a poorer experience for both parties that one can never be completely sure what is meant.

"Tough luck", you might say, but then why change it all? If we don't intend to really solve the problem we might as well leave it as it is.

[historic_bruno]

The change would be having color options for each player in match setup. And wouldn't it be easier to refer to player numbers or names instead of colors, if one of the players is colorblind?

[zoot]

The change would be having color options for each player in match setup.

Well, I was responding to Zaggy1024's suggestion.

And wouldn't it be easier to refer to player numbers or names instead of colors, if one of the players is colorblind?

In theory, it certainly would. What I'm saying is that I probably wouldn't want to worry about it in the midst of battle. I'd prefer if it - like so many other aspects of the game - just worked.

[quantumstate]

People often have names which are tricky to say and the name isn't immediately visible either. It is much easier to see that you are attacking the blue player. In my experience of playing AoE2 online player color was used almost exclusively. Maybe we can make the colorblind palette as similar to the normal palette as possible.

[Khopesh]

AoE did a reasonable job of choosing distinguishable colours. Only thing that was a problem was the mini-map. One solution there might be to to include an option to toggle ful-screen mini-maps. That way people wouldn't have to squint and struggle to see specks of gold and grey in amongst all the green.

Having the player set what team colours are would only really work for singleplayer. Multiplayer would be harder to make to fair to everyone.

As for seeing other colours - that's not usually a problem for me. I think some types of colourblindness do see the wrong colour though. Things just get a little harder to distinguish when reds and greens are used close together. And browns tend to be greeny/redish.

Also, if someone does struggle enough with colourblindness to the point it would effect their playing experience (especially online), they would just use a different way of describing who they are talking about (naming the civilization - I tend to do this anyway, even though colour isn't too bad for me).

As I said, I don't really know of any solutions as far as RTS games go. Again, AoE2 had a good choice of team colours, it was mainly the mini-map that caused the problems, and having it not-so-mini would help a great deal.

Edited March 3, 2013 by Khopesh

[Pedro Falcão]

I have 2 color-blind friends with whom i used to play Rise of Nations. According to them, player color wasn't that kind of a deal, except when there were many details in a gray/red/green combination, then they couldn't notice much of a difference.

As a side note, I'd like to remind of the map color schemes. I'm not color-blind, but sometimes i find it hard to differentiate the red player's units from gaia's units. Perhaps another color could be found for the gaia's units?

[Sighvatr]

How about in the settings menu we create a color options menu. In that menu, each player color may be adjusted by a gray and dark scale. You still keep a blue for player one, but someone who may be color blind may adjust the gray and dark of the hue.

[Foogod]

Hi all,

Just passing through, so feel free to ignore me completely if you want to, but I was looking over this thread because it was interesting to me and thought there were a couple of things that might be useful to point out:

First, I think you guys are really kinda overthinking this color-selection thing a bit. If you provide a default pallette, and then allow users to customize it themselves, I don't think it's unreasonable, or likely to be a problem, to assume that anybody who goes through the trouble of customizing their own colors should realize that their "blue" may now not be the same as other people's "blue" when talking to teammates. I know some gamers who do this on other games and don't seem to have a problem with it.

Second, keep in mind that you're not the first folks to try to tackle this issue. There are actually quite a few resources out there on how to make visuals (and even games in particular) color-blind friendly (actually, just doing a Google search for 'color-blind game design' pops up quite a few interesting links which you might want to read through)

Third, speaking as somebody who is color-blind, and knows folks of various degrees and types of color-blindness (and yes, there are different degrees, in case anyone was wondering), a couple of rules of thumb:

1. If you can take your game and translate it into grayscale and it's still playable, then you're pretty much guaranteed no color-blind person will have a problem with it. You don't have to go that far, of course (and it may be difficult to go that far), but it doesn't hurt to try it and see how close you are (and can show you whether there's some areas you need to look at in more detail, or some areas you really don't need to worry because you're fine)

2. The substantial majority of color-blind folks out there are red-green color blind, and most of them are only marginally so (they can see reds and greens just fine, it's just a little confusing when you start muddling them together in various degrees). You can go a long way by just making sure that (a) you try to stay away from reddish-greens or greenish-reds, off-yellows, or multiple shades of brown, and ( try to make colors with red/green/yellow/brown in them distinctly different brightness (i.e. you might use a bright-yellow with a dark-red, rather than mid-green with mid-brown)

3. Keep in mind that color-blindness really only affects about 4% of the population (though there are some studies that suggest it may be a bit higher in some groups, and some of those do tend to overlap with gamers, but still we're probably looking at less than 7-8% worst-case). I definitely think it's worth trying to support color-blind folks (particularly since I am one, and it isn't usually that hard), but don't let choosing just the right color scheme take huge amounts of development time that could be better used making the game as good as possible for the other 92% of the players out there as well.

My recommendations:

1. Choose some established color-blindness-friendly pallettes for your defaults (Googling 'color-blind pallette' should pull up a few)

2. Give users the option to change their colors on their own screen if they really want to (as I said, don't worry too much about communication issues.. I really bet there won't be many..)

3. From time to time, take some screenshots and put them through a grayscale filter and see how much of the important stuff you can still read.

If you do those three things, you're already way ahead of the game compared to most designers, and your game will probably be just fine for the majority of the color-blind people out there..

--Alex

[zoot]

1. If you can take your game and translate it into grayscale and it's still playable, then you're pretty much guaranteed no color-blind person will have a problem with it. You don't have to go that far, of course (and it may be difficult to go that far), but it doesn't hurt to try it and see how close you are (and can show you whether there's some areas you need to look at in more detail, or some areas you really don't need to worry because you're fine)

This seems like a good, practical rule of thumb. Obviously we can't make every shade in every texture perceivable in grayscale, but it ought to be possible for the most critical UI elements like the minimap, health bars etc.

[historic_bruno]

And it should be very easy to implement, there is already a greyscale post processing filter available in Atlas, I think you turn saturation all the way down to get it. That doesn't affect the UI but that's only a matter of getting the shaders to do what we want.

[Shield Bearer]

If the colorblind guy says: "attack blue", how do I know whether he is referring to my blue or his blue? IMO it's not realistic to expect random noobs to agree on such things beforehand, and it creates a poorer experience for both parties that one can never be completely sure what is meant. "Tough luck", you might say, but then why change it all? If we don't intend to really solve the problem we might as well leave it as it is.

How would a color blind person know what blue is if he hasn't seen it? His 'blue' would be conditioned by our blue right? So it would correspond to the same color... Unless of course, he wasn't born colorblind and knows what blue looks like

[zoot]

How would a color blind person know what blue is if he hasn't seen it? His 'blue' would be conditioned by our blue right? So it would correspond to the same color... Unless of course, he wasn't born colorblind and knows what blue looks like

My comment was in response to the suggestion of having an in-game option that would allow the user to make e.g. red show up as e.g. blue.

[Pedro Falcão]

The problem, Amish, is that they have less colors to represent all colors we see, so they can understand that that is blue, but which blue?

Edited March 7, 2013 by Pedro Falcão

[Shield Bearer]

Oh, I see, so they have trouble with too many shades of the same color, is that it?

[zoot]

A rainbow of colors vs. its simulated appearance for a person with protanopia (an uncommon, particularly severe form of color blindness):

"Attack yellow!"

[idanwin]

I do think we should not overthink this, but I also believe that allowing colours to be different for different players is a bad idea, why not make it match specific? When one of the players has 'colour'-blind mode activated in the options the match host will be asked to switch the match settings to colour-blind, which affects all players.

[Pedro Falcão]

I agree. People communicate better with minimap pings, anyways. Also, "friend or foe colors" would help with this matter.

[historic_bruno]

A rainbow of colors vs. its simulated appearance for a person with protanopia (an uncommon, particularly severe form of color blindness):

"Attack yellow!"

Couldn't they notice this in match setup and bring it to the other player's attention? "I can't tell the difference between player 2 and 4's colors". Then the host makes a change. I still say discussing it in match setup would clear all this up (ask people to use civs or player names instead of colors, if need be), and also that 8 player multiplayer games won't be that common so that reduces the number of possible conflicts, and finally that once we have color options for match setup, who's to say we can't have palette presets and some of them could be color blindness compatible?

[FeXoR]

Couldn't they notice this in match setup and bring it to the other player's attention? "I can't tell the difference between player 2 and 4's colors". Then the host makes a change. I still say discussing it in match setup would clear all this up (ask people to use civs or player names instead of colors, if need be), and also that 8 player multiplayer games won't be that common so that reduces the number of possible conflicts, and finally that once we have color options for match setup, who's to say we can't have palette presets and some of them could be color blindness compatible?

You have a very positive idea of humans (which honors you) ^^. I'm quite sure, though, that this will not work in most cases.

Finding 8 easy to notice player colors is hard on its own if blending like in the mini-map is involved IMO.

What about distorting a color space in a way that less easy to differentiate colors occupy less space in it (for normal users and all forms of color blindness) and then leaving the color to take to the player (while removing an area of size and shape hard to differentiate from a player color already present). That way it should be possible to be about optimal. It may be hard though to find the optimal distortion function as well as the shape of the removed area per present player colors (I guess it would be more a star or a cross instead of a circle).

If we would grand a player the option to pick his "type of color blindness" (with default set to "None") in the player options and have color space distortion functions for all types of color blindness (including non-color-blinds ability to differentiate colors) only those functions needed could be applied to the color space (The shape of the removed space might as well depend on that).

Another possibility would be to calculate the optimal player colors for a given number of players (or just be picked by a person experienced in it).. I don't think it's that hard for up to 4 players (+ gaia and ground textures) but for more players it will get harder. If the number of players change all player colors would be change then. So problems are much easier to avoid with less players (which indeed might be the more common case).

For non-color-blind it would be something like this: http://en.wikipedia....LMS_color_space

It should be easy to determine those functions for color blinded because they generally have the same wavelength they can see just one of them is missing AFAIK. So if not two kinds of color-blind PPL enter a game you have still tree dimensions in the color space (Hue (determined by players ability to see colors), Colorfulness and Darkness/Lightness)

Other resources:

http://en.wikipedia....ute_color_space

If the psychophysical color space is understood well enough it could also be taken into consideration.

(It's funny: Though I'm not aware of any color vision deficit I fail the "Test for deuteranopia" and "Test for tritanopia" in http://en.wikipedia....Color_blindness)

Edited March 10, 2013 by FeXoR

[zoot]

I believe the only color space that works for everyone is grayscale, and that is probably going too far. But when we use reds and greens (the two most commonly affected colors), we should take care to use, say, a dark red vs. a bright green so brightness acts as an additional cue.

[FeXoR]

I believe the only color space that works for everyone is grayscale, and that is probably going too far. But when we use reds and greens (the two most commonly affected colors), we should take care to use, say, a dark red vs. a bright green so brightness acts as an additional cue.

Yes, yes, I'm often going to far, you're right ^^. But basically that's what I was proposing: Maximize the distance in color space for all kinds of color blindness (with higher respect to the more common ones). Making it dependent on the number of players would "only" need 7 pallets (2-8 players) that than are available. With many players it will still be hard but for a lower number of players that should be quite easy.

At first glance there are at least 4 colors that can be differentiated between by all (non monochromatic) color blinded (and named as well for in-game communication):

- dark red

- light yellow (shifted a bit to orange)

- light blue (between blue and cyan)

- dark purple (more like blue shifted a bit to purple but looks purple to me)

(And I like those colors)

Though red (or purple if shifted to far to pure purple) will be seen as gray by some they know what color it is because it's the only gray. Adding the colors name to be shown in the game setup screen might be still helpful for communication later in-game.

Why not use green? Because some see it as yellow while others see it as blue (the two most frequent color blindnesses). So it would sort out two other colors.

Any experienced person here to show examples for 5-8 color pallets? (I certainly wouldn't mind if those for higher numbers of players look not that cool cause it's not the common case anyway. The main thing is they work for 97.5% of PPL - meaning Monochromacy and Dichromacy might be ignored for 7 and 8 player pallets. If the color 7/8 color palates look too ugly we can still ignore color blindness in this cases IMO. It's hard enough for a non-color-blind to differentiate 8 colors with blending on the mini-map).

Other helpful resources might be:

http://www.daltonize.org/

http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/

http://unm-bioblog.b...-blindness.html

http://mengbomin.wor...resting-points/

http://www.mrexcel.c...nd-viewers.html

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

http://www.disturbmedia.com/max/colour-blindness.html (Including HTML code to simulate color-blindness)

(Off topic: I stumbled over this one on the way: http://3.bp.blogspot..._viruscomix.jpg )

Edited March 9, 2013 by FeXoR

[feneur]

(It's funny: Though I'm not aware of any color deficit I fail the "Test for deuteranopia" and "Test for tritanopia" in http://en.wikipedia....Color_blindness)

Wow, those are extreme I mean I can tell the difference, but it's not easy to see anything in those images

[Lion.Kanzen]

Im Left-handed, some user may be want a Hot key config for lef handed. is a sugesstion.

[Pedro Falcão]

IIRC, hotkeys can already be manually changed, Lion.