Making Games Better for Gamers with Colourblindness & Low Vision | Designing for Disability

Video games are for everyone, and they can even be enjoyed by those who live with disabilities if game developers make certain design decisions, or introduce certain options. In this series of videos, I’m looking at how to implement some of the most popular and easy options to make games better for those with auditory, visual, motor, or cognitive disabilities. In this second episode of the show, I’m looking at options for those living with visual impairments such as colourblindness, and low vision.

Part 1 - Colourblindness In Cuphead, it’s easy to tell the difference between these pink punches (which you can parry), and the blue ones, (which you can’t). Unless, the game looked liked this. And when hacking cameras and whatnot in Bioshock 2, you shouldn’t have a problem differentiating between green cells, which give you access, and red cells, which trigger an alarm. Unless, the game looked like this. This is what playing games can be like for those who have colour vision deficiency - more commonly known as being colourblind. That’s when one or more of the receptors in your eyes is defective, which can reduce your ability to see a particular chunk of the colour spectrum and make it difficult to tell the difference between some hues.

There are three major types of colour blindness: Deuteranopia, which effects the perception of green tones, is the most common form. Protanopia is less common, and affects red tones. In practice, these two forms of colourblindness look quite similar, and are sometimes referred to together as red-green colourblindness. And then there’s tritanopia which is very rare, and affects your ability to see yellow and, to a lesser extent, blue.

We use the suffix “anopia” when the cone is completely missing, and the suffix “anomaly” when the cone is defective. There’s also the ultra rare achromatopsia, where you literally see the world in black and white. And colour vision deficiency can result from physical or neurological damage, which can lead to very unique effects. Colourblindness affects approximately 1 in 12 men, and 1 in 200 women. Developers can check to see if their games are readable by those who are colourblind by checking with colourblind gamers, or using free filter tools to simulate what their game might look like to people with the three major vision deficiencies.

A tool like Color Oracle allows you to see static images in a simulated colourblind mode, while the program Sim Daltonism can show you the world through colourblind eyes, in real time. There are also filters for game engines like Unreal Engine, which is available by default, and Unity, which I’ll link to in the description. Then, once the filters are applied, developers should see if critical information like HUD elements, alerts, enemy differences, crosshairs, explosive barrels, loot rarity, damage indicators, or waypoints are lost or difficult to distinguish.

And so, if you’ve run the filter and realised that colourblind gamers won’t be able to see their red laser sight against different backgrounds, or tell the difference between the red team and the green team, or pick out the gold loot from the green loop, what do you do? The best solution is to design around this issue, and simply avoid relying on colour alone when communicating information, or distinguishing between two different things.

Designers should try to use shapes, symbols, shading, animation, and other visual tricks to make critical parts of the game stand out from one another. Take, for example, Recore: a shooter with colour-coded enemies and weapons, where you’ll need to use red bullets on red enemies - and so on. Developer Armature Studio wisely decided to not just use colours, but also put high contrast white arrows on the enemy’s health bar - left for blue, up for yellow, and right for red - which corresponds to the d-pad direction you must press to change to the same-coloured bullets.

If you don’t want to make these symbols appear for everyone, you can have them as part of an optional colourblind mode. A great example of this is the charming colour-swapping puzzler Hue, where a colourblind mode applies symbols to the different colours to make them visually distinct from one another. And in Chromagun, which has to deal with lots of colours and colour combinations, a really clever symbol system is used. So there’s a unique symbol for the base colours - a vertical line for yellow, a horizontal line for blue, and a circle for red. And then these symbols can combine to make the mixtures of orange, purple, and green - and a final one for black.

That means you can play the game fully, no matter what colours you can and can’t see. Where it’s not possible to design around this issue, the next best step is to allow players to customise the colours they see on screen. The gold standard is Battlefield 1. Here, the squad and enemy colours - that pesky red and green again - are hard to distinguish for players with deuteranopia. And the squad and team colours - green and blue - merge together for those with tritanopia. So DICE provides a colourblind option that lets you swap those four colours for a palette that will be more distinguishable for those with different forms of CVD.

Bonus points for showing the change on the options screen itself, and mega bonus points for letting players simply pick four colours of their own choosing from a Photoshop-like colour picker. Slightly more simple, one-size-fits-all options can be found in Far Cry 5, which changes red elements to yellow. And in the Call of Duty games, where a colourblind option swaps the classic green and red labels, for team members and enemies, to blue and yellow ones.

Here’s another good example, from the puzzle game The Spectrum Retreat, which has four different coloured blocks to play with. In this game, a colour vision mode has a different colour palette for deuteranopia or protanopia, another for tritanopia, and a black and white one that will work with achromatopsia and other rare vision deficiencies, If you’re looking for a good colour palette for a colourblind mode, use blue and orange as your primary colours when contrasting key elements - these will stick out from one another for gamers with all three major types of CVD. Beyond that, very light and dark colours will also show up, as those with colourblindness can still see differences in brightness, provided the difference is strong enough. And, of course, black and white are visible to everyone.

Now, some developers seem to think that the best solution is to provide a filter that will try to recolour the entire screen. But this is tricky to get right, and rarely the best approach. Overwatch, for example, has these filters that completely recolour the game and while some players do appreciate these filters - for many, they don’t really help, and just end up making the game look utterly bonkers. These settings shouldn’t mean you experience colours in games differently than you perceive them naturally in the real world. Instead, they should simply help players to clearly see vital bits of information.

At least its better than Doom, which somehow managed to include a filter that actually simulates the effects of being colourblind, rather than help them. Chuck on deutronopia mode, for example, and it just… shows you what the game would look like if you had that form of colourblindness. How this ended up in the final game is beyond me. And finally, for games where colour combinations keep changing - like the ultra colourful Splatoon - it’s good to offer an option that will lock team colours to something universally distinguishable - in this case light orange and dark blue - so players will never come across a colour combination they can’t see. This doesn’t affect all players, as the colours are only locked on the console of the player who chose the option.

Part Two - Low Vision When God of War came out on PS4 this year, many players struggled to enjoy the game for one, significant reason: the text size was tiny. Anyone with low vision - or just those who are trying to play the game on a smaller TV - would struggle to read the game’s subtitles and menus. Thankfully, Sony Santa Monica updated the game, and included a slider that lets you change the text size. It’s still pretty small, but it’s something.

And it's a good reminder that games can do better to help players see critical information. Because there are a huge range of conditions that can reduce your your field of vision, meaning how much you can see, and acuity, meaning how clearly you can see it. But designers can work to help those players with design considerations that generally come down to two core things: size and contrast. So, devs should make text, user interface elements, button prompts and alerts big and easy to read. As a rough guide for console games, you should not drop below 28 pixel fonts on any UI text, and nothing below 46 pixels for subtitles. Plus, developers should try to make them contrast against different backgrounds by using dark shadows or outlines.

Don’t fall into the trap of only ever testing your game from a computer on your desk - see what it looks like on a TV on the other side of the room. If you don’t want to do it by default, then at least consider adding in an option. In Monster Hunter World, there’s an option that will boost the size of text on the interface and tutorial. In Borderlands The Presequel, you can boost the size of the whole user interface to make things like your health and ammo easier to see. And in Assassin’s Creed Origins, there’s an option to add a black box behind the subtitle text to make it easier to see them against the game.

One more thing to consider is the use of clear, easy-to-read fonts. Sci-fi screen text or gothic letterpress or handwritten scribbles might fit the game world, but they can be a nightmare to read with low vision, or from a distance. You don’t need to take the personality out of your game, though: simply give players the ability to read the on-screen text in a standard, sans serif font - like in The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit.

Another option that benefits players with low vision, is some form of high contrast mode that makes critical parts of the game better stand out against the background. Take Street Fighter IV, where the animated backgrounds might be beautiful and atmospheric - but they can also make it hard to see the actual fighters. A graphical option replaces these backgrounds with a simple black room, making Ryu and chums easily visible to all.

Meanwhile, an indie shmup, Shoot 1UP, lets you choose the opacity of the background layer. Drop it down to low, and the unimportant backdrop gets darker - causing enemy ships and bullets to stick out like a sore thumb. For some games this can be a really easy option to implement, because it’s just a black rectangle between foreground and background. It’s also important for a game to have a really vivid soundscape, so that critical information can be picked up by those with low vision. It’s easy to know that you’ve killed a Combine soldier in Half Life 2, for example, because they play a loud flatlining sound when they die.

In fact, some games can even be played by gamers who are completely blind, if the soundscape is detailed and covers all important information. Fighting games are a good example of this. Their simple environment, combined with great sound design, mean they’re often accessible by default. But some extra considerations are needed. For example, NetherRealms’s fighting games Injustice and Mortal Kombat X have interactable stage elements, and - at the launch of Injustice - the only way to know that you can use them is to look out for a white visual cue.

But after receiving feedback from blind players, the devs added an accessibility option that plays a pulsing sound effect if a player is near one of these interactables. The sound plays in the left ear of your headphones if you’re stood in front of it, or in the right ear if your opponent is. Now, blind gamers can even compete in tournaments. Another blind gamer, SightlessKombat, asked the devs of Killer Instinct to add audio cues to correspond with HUD elements like the knockdown value meter and the shadow meter - so he knows when combos are about to drop, and when special attacks are ready for use. Those sounds are now in the game, and there’s a menu option that lets you change the volume of those sounds.

Because, like in the audio episode, games should let you change the volume of different audio sources so players can dip or mute the music to better focus on critical sound effects. You can also support screenreaders, which are external pieces of software that can read out text from a game. The fighting game Skullgirls, for example, is configured to work with screenreaders, and it will read out menu text to low sighted players. This would make lots of sense for interface-driven games like Hearthstone, or text-heavy games like visual novels that don’t have voice acting. I’ve put some links in the description to some handy resources, if you want to consider this option.

Ultimately, video games are a massively visual medium - which means disabilities that affect your vision will undoubtedly affect your ability to play. But smart design choices and handy options will make most games way more accessible to those who are colourblind, or live with low vision. Just remember: don’t rely on colour alone, focus on size and contrast, and invest in good audio. Beyond that, make sure you test your games for this stuff - either by working with players with disabilities, or simply playing your game on a TV that’s across the room, or by using colourblind filters.

Do that and not only will your game be more accessible - but also help out players who are playing on a smaller screen, or squinting to see their TV in a sunny room, or playing on a phone in battery saving mode, and so on. As with all accessibility measures, pretty much everyone will benefit from a little extra work. Thanks for watching! Huge thanks this week to accessibility specialist Ian Hamilton, of the Game Accessibility Guidelines, who provided loads of help. Plus, a team of colourblind gamers on Twitter who shared their experiences with me.

Future episodes will cover motor disabilities, as well as cognitive disabilities like simulation sickness, epilepsy, and dyslexia. GMTK and Designing for Disability are powered by Patreon.