Here’s the new episode of Designing for Disability. This time, we’re looking at colourblindness and low vision!
I know these videos are never going to do gangbusters in terms of traffic, and will attract shitty comments (some of which I’ve deleted), but it’s an important subject and I’d be wasting the amazing platform you’ve given me if I didn’t do stuff like this. Cheers!
Most of the negative comments I get on these accessibility videos boil down to “this is nice, but it’s a waste of development time for such a small portion of players”. This is a cosmically bad take.
1) Accessibility options help loads of players, not just the disabled. Subtitles are great for non-native speakers, or when playing in a noisy room. Button remapping is cool if you’ve broken your arm. Slow-mo modes are fab for getting a non-gamer into tricky platformers.
2) Many accessibility options are really easy to implement. Colourblind settings are often just changing RGB values. High contrast mode might be a black rectangle underneath the sprites. QTEs can be switched from “tap repeatedly” to “hold button”.
3) Sometimes the accessibility options are already in the game, but just done poorly. Like with subtitles: you’ve got a subtitle system implemented, but you just need to work on size / contrast / placement, etc. That’s an easy fix!
4) A small portion isn’t really a small portion. Millions of people live with disabilities. Especially colourblindness, which affects 1 in 12 men. You could shut out, or welcome in thousands of new players with these design choices. Yay for money!
And ultimately, don’t be a dick. Everyone deserves to play games, so if it’s feasible to put these options in then developers absolutely should.
