Colorblind Accessibility in Video Games

Common Vision Deficiencies

  • Protanopia: Deficiency in perceiving red light; reds and greens look murky, while blues and yellows stand out.
  • Deuteranopia: Deficiency in perceiving green light; reds and greens look murky, while blues and yellows stand out.
  • Tritanopia: Deficiency in perceiving blue light; greens look murky and reds appear pink.

Evaluation of Full-Screen Filters

  • Used by titles such as Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Call of Duty: Ghosts, DOOM, and Overwatch.
  • Madden 1717 by EA Sports also adopted this method.
  • Drawbacks: Filters often oversaturate the entire palette or mute colors (e.g., in DOOM), making the game look unnatural.
  • Effectiveness: Can worsen visibility; in Overwatch, tritanopia mode can make "friendly" and "enemy" indicators more indistinguishable.

Benefits of Specific UI Customization

  • Focuses only on vital indicators (UI, health bars, squad colors) without altering the game world colors.
  • Battlefield 44: Offers presets like Protanopia (Squad: gray, Team: purple, Enemy: green) and instructs players to choose the highest contrast option.
  • Destiny: Employs similar preset palettes for the three deficiency types.
  • Battleborn: Allows high customization of "Color-Coded Teams," letting players manually select colors for health bars and heroes.

Iconography and Multi-Modal Conveyance

  • Grand Theft Auto 55: Uses specific icons to convey meaning, ensuring information is not solely dependent on color.
  • Hearthstone: Blizzard incorporated hero symbols in the card collection UI alongside color coding.
  • Recore: Developed by Armature Studio, this game announced an "innovative icon-based" accessibility approach.
  • Best Practice: Use a "trifecta" of conveyance—audio, visual, and textual.

Industry Conclusions and Best Practices

  • Avoid whole-screen filters: They compress the color palette and create new color clashes.
  • Personalization over Universal Presets: "One size does not fit all"; allow players to customize colors for outlines and status bars.
  • Avoiding Color Dependency: Information should never be conveyed by color alone.
  • Integration: Bill Hardin notes that usability research should be included early in the development schedule to avoid accessibility being an afterthought.