I have been mulling over this post since the expansion released, but between the new Unreal and the new trial (particularly the EX), I've finally hit the point where I feel pressed enough to make it:
Dawntrail has been, and seems poised to continue to be, extremely hostile to colourblind players.
I can only speak from the perspective of a red/green colourblind individual (red being particularly bad, for me), but even with a relatively mild form of it, many fights are rendered next to unplayable. EX1 is a constant red on red/red on green flashbang. Everything about M3S was orange (something I thought the devs would have learned from after the community response to P3S). Suzaku remains orange on orange/brown on brown, with visual indicators on the floor that cannot be parsed by colourblind players. I understand that that's how the fight was. But frankly, fights should be brought to modern accessibility standards. The mechs do not have to change. And finally, EX4. The normal version of the trial already features extremely washed out and low contrast red/green floor indicators, and the extreme only exacerbates the issue.
I don't understand why this continues to happen. It's unacceptable, to be dead honest. The games industry has the technology to make accessibility better. The game has had many, many, many fights that do not have these issues. Doing better is possible. They just aren't.
There are two really pivotal changes that I feel can AND SHOULD be made in order to further accessibility:
1) Just don't design fights with inaccessible colour palettes. Full stop. M5-M8 are all visually stunning, cohesively themed fights without running into colour vision issues outside of one relatively minor mechanic in M6. And even if there was an aesthetic reason to lean into the same spicy chicken palette as P3, no aesthetic is worth sacrificing accessibility.
2) Implement better colour accessibility options. Full screen shaders are not a solution. They do not work, and have never worked. They strip contrast out of the visual elements on-screen because they are stripping out hard to see colours. The problem there is that we have, in our limited human vision, limited colours. Colourblind individuals rely very heavily on what contrast we DO get to parse things visually. Removing that makes it worse. Good colourblindness settings tweak the colours of ONLY important elements, which might include things like buffs, debuffs, and aoes.
Ultimately, I find this issue frustrating because better is so, so possible. The resources exist. This is not a small company. And it feels like folks like me are begging for scraps.
Please do better.
Continue reading...
Dawntrail has been, and seems poised to continue to be, extremely hostile to colourblind players.
I can only speak from the perspective of a red/green colourblind individual (red being particularly bad, for me), but even with a relatively mild form of it, many fights are rendered next to unplayable. EX1 is a constant red on red/red on green flashbang. Everything about M3S was orange (something I thought the devs would have learned from after the community response to P3S). Suzaku remains orange on orange/brown on brown, with visual indicators on the floor that cannot be parsed by colourblind players. I understand that that's how the fight was. But frankly, fights should be brought to modern accessibility standards. The mechs do not have to change. And finally, EX4. The normal version of the trial already features extremely washed out and low contrast red/green floor indicators, and the extreme only exacerbates the issue.
I don't understand why this continues to happen. It's unacceptable, to be dead honest. The games industry has the technology to make accessibility better. The game has had many, many, many fights that do not have these issues. Doing better is possible. They just aren't.
There are two really pivotal changes that I feel can AND SHOULD be made in order to further accessibility:
1) Just don't design fights with inaccessible colour palettes. Full stop. M5-M8 are all visually stunning, cohesively themed fights without running into colour vision issues outside of one relatively minor mechanic in M6. And even if there was an aesthetic reason to lean into the same spicy chicken palette as P3, no aesthetic is worth sacrificing accessibility.
2) Implement better colour accessibility options. Full screen shaders are not a solution. They do not work, and have never worked. They strip contrast out of the visual elements on-screen because they are stripping out hard to see colours. The problem there is that we have, in our limited human vision, limited colours. Colourblind individuals rely very heavily on what contrast we DO get to parse things visually. Removing that makes it worse. Good colourblindness settings tweak the colours of ONLY important elements, which might include things like buffs, debuffs, and aoes.
Ultimately, I find this issue frustrating because better is so, so possible. The resources exist. This is not a small company. And it feels like folks like me are begging for scraps.
Please do better.
Continue reading...