[games_access] Fwd: Personas, etc. but what is really needed...

[Reid Kimball]

Eelke,

I don't see making an accessibility option for colorblind to be
difficult. There are two areas where this can be applied, Game UI and
Game Space. Game UI is of course the UI, like menus and HUD elements.
Game Space includes all the players, NPCs, gameplay objects,
environment and so on. I've usually thought of colorblindness only
being affected by Game UI, but you do bring up a good point about Game
Space elements causing problems.

Here's a couple ideas to help with Game Space color problems. Colors
as we all know are used to convey information, such as red = something
bad and green = something good, most times. What developers need to do
is layer different forms of communicating this information to not only
use color, but also form. Even if a player can't see the difference
between red and green, the shape should make up for that.

Another option is screen wide render changes, it may be possible to
some color analysis as Ben suggests, but if not, why not choose a
"high contrast" mode which changes how the game renders all the
graphics. 3D engines for big budget games usually have a way to render
the screen differently, like a black and white mode or with a blue
tint. There could be a colorblindness mode that renders everything in
a better way.

-Reid


On 6/5/07, Ben Sawyer <bsawyer at dmill.com> wrote:
> > Has anyone developed an algorithm that can scan the last draw of a
> > frame and switch colors based on looking at what's near it to
> > improve it?  I think also that there has been some basic work for
> > improving distinct items such as interface elements.  There
> > certainly seems to me to still be a possible algorithmic way to
> > improve this where you'd provide a pointer to the final rendering
> > at the framebuffer and then run a passover it and output to the
> > screen (UI not withstanding which you would do otherwise).
> >
> > Ben: color blindness, that's incredibly hard, I don't even think you
> > will be able to write code for that. Checking for particular color
> > schemes (lets say red on green) can be anywhere in the game e.g. on
> > game objects / textures. Interaction between objects, Light effects &
> > shading & blending can lead to non desirable color schemes. There's no
> > way you can possibly identify that upfront. The only way I can imagine
> > to deal with it would be to make artist aware to use non colourblind
> > colour schemes.
>
>
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