A thread on colourblindness & #gamedev - If your approach to colourblindness is full screen filters, you're *doing it wrong*, and causing more problems that you're solving. If you see a game that has filters, they're doing it wrong. If you see a game that has a 'strength' slider - don't copy it. - ThreadSky

ianhamilton.bsky.social • 154 days ago

A thread on colourblindness & #gamedev -

If your approach to colourblindness is full screen filters, you're *doing it wrong*, and causing more problems that you're solving.

If you see a game that has filters, they're doing it wrong. If you see a game that has a 'strength' slider - don't copy it.

Comments

grcooper.bsky.social•154 days ago

100%. I trained my artists to use me as the “filter” (colorblind)

youdiedtm.bsky.social•154 days ago

Why make this a thread when it should be a proper article

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

Why make anything a thread :)

mtt88h.bsky.social•154 days ago

Though there's a couple fun Novels, Anime and Mangas about characters maxing one stat.

pedro-damasceno.bsky.social•148 days ago

@alanzucconi.com has a good tutorial on how to produce a shader (in Unity) to simulate the different types of color blindness.
I remember using it years ago and it was very interesting.
https://www.alanzucconi.com/2015/12/16/color-blindness/

alanzucconi.com•147 days ago

Thank you for sharing this! 🙏

I'm really glad to see more and more devs are integrating accessibility into the (early!) design of their games!

apexstupidity.bsky.social•154 days ago

Valve playtested Team Fortress 2 in black and white to make sure that it didn’t matter what kind of colourblindness you have, you can always tell exactly what’s going on by shades and silhouettes alone

elnuru.bsky.social•154 days ago

Thanks, I was 100% disagreeing with this until I saw your explanation, it does make sense putting it like that

apexstupidity.bsky.social•154 days ago

Filters are not only useless for colourblind players but are also bad for replicating the effect for developers, because in reality colourblindness is not a case of a green tint covering my vision at all times, it’s just that two colours are hard to distinguish

apexstupidity.bsky.social•154 days ago

It was incredibly disheartening to see Tekken 8 get so much praise for its colourblind mode, because despite a lot of effort clearly going into it, it was completely useless. It’s blatant that no colourblind individuals were actually consulted on it

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

it's a start, but can actually lull you into a false sense of security! https://bsky.app/profile/ianhamilton.bsky.social/post/3lc3h4favjc2c

stormingromans.bsky.social•154 days ago

I've always found the filter approach to be hopeless, usually making it even worse for me. Anything where things are colour coded and only differentiated by colour infuriate me.

duskaris.bsky.social•154 days ago

📌

actuallyphaneronic.bsky.social•153 days ago

My recently released game is going to struggle with anyone who is colorblind. It never occurred to me until the game was released. Now I'm considering ways to make it better for individuals who are unable to discern the tiles colors!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2809700/Mushroom_Moonrise/

jack-134.bsky.social•153 days ago

As a colorblind person I enjoyed how Planet Coaster 2 handled it, which was just labeling every color swatch in the customize menu with a name.

nostalgianinja.com•154 days ago

I find it interesting how SEGA in their infinite wisdom had alphabet Puyo (which is clearly defined letters for a game that requires color recognition) before they decided on color blindness filters. Puyo Puyo has always had trouble by design for color blindness, and they're thinking about it now.

joekinglake.bsky.social•154 days ago

Great point on the use of the Unreal filters, they're simply for the simulation OF colourblindness not a fix-all filter. I've seen this misunderstood on the development shop floor several times.

I have found the use of these filters to be an enlightening tool for teams, but they are easily misused.

joekinglake.bsky.social•154 days ago

Designing for colourblindness is, as you say, a practical decision making process that avoids the use of colour as the singular method for communicating information.

And even the filters don't give you the whole picture and shouldn't be relied on exclusively.

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

They actually have both, it's the "correction" filters that I'm talking about in the thread. The simulation filters came first, but then Fortnite implemented "correction" filters so those were then brought back into the engine for all developers to use.

joekinglake.bsky.social•154 days ago

Oh wow I had no idea! That's frustratingly misleading!

zetasole.bsky.social•154 days ago

📌

staticblitz.bsky.social•154 days ago

Thank you for this thread, this is something I wonder about a lot but couldn't figure out a solution for on my own that satisfied me.
I'm not colorblind myself, but I always kinda suspected that a colour filter wouldn't work well bc it's a bandaid "fix" on fundamentally inaccessible design.

staticblitz.bsky.social•154 days ago

📌

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

You suspected correctly, your instincts are good :)

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

The first question to ask is what exactly am I trying to fix here? If the answer is "what colourblind people see" then that's the wrong question, need to be looking at what specifically the issues would be.

medialator.bsky.social•27 days ago

We had a pushy company try and get it's useless filter/remapping stuff into the digital television spec. I advised our management that it was to be resisted and the company eventually gave up and went away. It was one of those cases where the company had set up an astroturf campaign 🤮

ianhamilton.bsky.social•27 days ago

That sounds vaguely familiar actually

medialator.bsky.social•27 days ago

I can't remember the name of the company, but they were remapping UV and IR into the visible spectrum and thought they could get a nice earner from DTV...

medialator.bsky.social•27 days ago

I consulted a real expert in the topic https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pJjyC-AAAAAJ&hl=en who rubbished their approach. David's work is really good in this area. Also I have two brothers with non-standard colour vision, so found the astroturfing particularly offensive.

samstupidheart.bsky.social•154 days ago

I am very passionate about accessibility.
I saw another thread saying colour filters are useful for synesthesia:
https://bsky.app/profile/laurakbuzz.bsky.social/post/3lbyzeeohik2h
Do you believe full screen filters are totally ineffective, or do they still provide some value?
Your thread here is very informative, thank you for it! =)

laurakbuzz.bsky.social•154 days ago

To be clear, my thread actively acknowledges they are not useful for their intended disability group.

I am not arguing they should exist, just that they turn out to be accidently useful for a niche application they were not designed for.

laurakbuzz.bsky.social•154 days ago

For my specific type of Synesthesia they can brute force me a fix. there are probably better things a dev could do deliberately, but weirdly they do help in some games for my unique case.

samstupidheart.bsky.social•154 days ago

It's still an interesting use-case even if it is unique.
I'm a big believer that we can create good habits in design that include everyone. =)

samstupidheart.bsky.social•154 days ago

Oh yes, I should clarify I am not advocating for filters! =) I am curious if they might be something that is still useful, even if they are a wrong approach for colourblindness.
At the moment, the main use I am understanding is for simulating the colourblindness for us devs, rather than helping it.

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

I think there's probably a good distinction to make between concept of filters and of compressing specific areas of the spectrum for prot-deut-trit. @laurakbuzz.bsky.social re better things devs could do deliberately, how about system level filter that reduces saturation of high saturation yellow?

quentinstn.bsky.social•154 days ago

Looks like there will be no need for a filter with Asthenia since it is mostly yellow/Brown and Blue. Thanks for the informations.

laurakbuzz.bsky.social•154 days ago

Yeah, that's the sort of thing that would probably help. In the past I've tried to use overall screen brightness sliders as a work around, or even just polarised sunglasses just to shift coulours a little.

Thread was just an acknowledgement I'd not considered another common feature as an option.

whatcoloristhat.bsky.social•152 days ago

Great thread!

I made a game to show non-colorblind people what’s it like when software gets this wrong.

https://jdestaz.itch.io/colorblind-curse

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

The fact that Unreal included filters doesn't mean they should have, or that you should use them. Don't.

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

Inaccessibility for colourblindness is caused by design choices. A design issue, not an engineering issue. The fix is design choices, not engineering workarounds.

Filters are inherently exclusionary, they aren't the answer. Fix the design instead of trying to fix people's eyes.

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

Can you see anything about this post that would require colourblindness settings? No, there's nothing about it that would be a barrier for people with any kind of colourblindness. It's accessible by default - hue alone doesn't communicate/differentiate info, and it doesn't have contrast issues.

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

It's exactly the same with games. Games don't become inaccessible unless you design them to be. If you choose to make your game inaccessible by default then you're left with having to spend time and money on inelegant hacky workarounds, so avoiding problems by default is always better.

gulliverfoyle.bsky.social•154 days ago

If you frame aesthetic choices as intentional inaccessibility you’re soapbox-preaching to the choir and not even trying to persuade anyone of anything except “Ian is good you should like Ian”

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

Well luckily instead of theorising I have nearly two decades of experience of this that says otherwise

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

To understand how to avoid issues you first need to understand a bit about how colourblindness works. It means reduced perception of certain hues. Most commonly known about are protanopia / deuteranopia / tritanopia, which literally just mean first / second / third type. Each affects a different..

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

...part of the spectrum. Prot/deut are pretty similar, reds and greens are hard to tell apart, you can still distinguish yellow from blue but greens and reds are a similiar muddy brownish colour, with prot you see less red so reds are darker, for deut greens are darker.

medoria.bsky.social•154 days ago

Filters are good for visualizing content and testing how your game might appear but 1000% it needs to come from design.

ianhamilton.bsky.social•154 days ago

Yep totally, it's "correction" filters that I'm talking about in the thread

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