Designing a UI to accommodate for colorblind gamers
GalCiv3 Forums
Hi all, new poster, long time GalCiv fan. I've been lurking the forums a lot and reading a lot of the gameplay discussions and generally been gobbling up every new scrap of news that comes out. At the moment however I want to bring up an issue that is tangentially related to gameplay itself. As the thread title suggests the issue is UI design when it comes to accommodating colorblind gamers. As you might guess, I am one of those gamers. This issue recently popped up again when Gearbox announced that they were going to be adding a colorblind mode to Borderlands 2.
In the above post Gearbox Programmer Jeff Broome offers a lot of great info on colorblindness, or more accurately Color Vision Deficiency (CVD), and how to accommodate for it. To offer a short summary though, as many of you may have learned in biology in school our vision works via two forms of light receptors in our eyes, referred to as Rods and Cones. The rods are concentrated in your peripheral vision and are sensitive to intensity of light and not color. The cones on the other hand are what sense color. There are three types of cones that react to different wavelengths of light. Color Vision Deficiency is cause by malfunctioning genes in your chromosomes. The two most common types of CVD are cause by malfunctioning recessive genes on the X chromosome (which is why so few women have CVD, they get two chances to have a functioning gene). These two forms of CVD are Protonopia/Protonamaly and Deuteranopia/Deuteranomaly and are typically referred to as red-green color blindness. While they are different the effect on ones color vision is very similar. The third type of CVD is Tritanopia/Tritanomaly which is blue-yellow color deficiency and is quite rare. It however is not on the X chromosome and as such men and women suffer from this type of CVD in equal amount, as I noted though it is quite rare just the same. The difference between the 'opia' and the 'omaly' is that the 'opia' version indicates and complete absence of the respective cone whereas the 'omaly' indicates that the cones are there, but malfunctioning to some degree.
So, enough of the biology. What do we do with all this information? Well, the most fundamental thing to be aware of is that people with CVD do not see the world the same way people with normal vision do. Practically speaking for the most part we make it through life with very little real impact from CVD. There are however things that give us trouble, some trivial, some not so much.
How does this apply to gaming though, and why am I raising the issue now? The thing is, lots of games rely very heavily on color in their UI's to provide important information. To take an example, with the colorblind mode that Gearbox added to BL2, they did two major things. First they shifted the colors on the loot beams to try to make it easier to spot loot lieing on the ground and second they added text to the item cards that flat out said what color the item is. These are positive changes, however even color shifting can only help so much. What really would have helped is to modify the particle effect of the loot beam for the rarer item types, add some fancy sparkles or something. Unfortunately so far after the game was launched it was no longer possible to make such a major change.
And that is why I want to bring this issue up now. Right now is when Stardock is still doing the core design for the UI which makes this the perfect time to be thinking about how color is used to present information in the UI. To provide another example, League of Legends made a big splash when it added a colorblind mode a few years ago. While I don't play the game I've seen lots of screenshots and in my opinion they addressed the issue in nearly the perfect manner. The thing they realized is that color should not be used by itself as the primary indicator of information. What they did is use shapes and modified particle effects to provide information in addition to color. The color blind mode was in fact so successful that even normal vision players started using it, which ultimately resulted in a lot of the changes being rolled into the normal mode.
The takeaway of all this is really quite simple, do not rely on color as the sole indicator of information, make use of patterns, shapes, and particle effects to help convey information.
