Popcap games did a survey to determine how many disable people were playing casual games. More disabled people tend to play games more often and longer compared to the general population. The point that people can take way from this study is disabled people tend to be gamers to a greater percentage than the general population and it would be wise for developers to make their games more accessible to a large willing consumer base thats normailly ignored.
Most developers haven’t started offering accessibility to those of us who are colorblind, so I don’t expect them to start incorporating other accessibility.
Of that 1 in 5:
Don’t hold your breath for games accessible to people with bipolar personality disorder…
“Your game has ended. Would you like to continue?”
“Yes! This is the best game ever made and I’d like seven more sequels!”
“No! You fucking suck! I can’t believe I wasted my time with this piece of trash you asshole!”
ADD/ADHD 46%
That explains why I can’t ever seem to finish a game anymore…
I’m more of a quantum indeterminate gamer than a causal gamer.
I always find this exceptionally amazing considering that there have been colorblind people working at both of the game companies I have worked for. I’ve always put in bugs for accessibility issues if they were brought to my attention, but the industry needs more people willing to be advocates for these types of issues.
If you’d been paying attention, that’s 46% of the 25% who are developmentally disabled so it’s really only like 12% of the 20% totally disabled so it’s really only like 2.2% of all their gamers.
Well, the mentally disabled bit covers 99% of the pickup groups that I’ve joined in WoW.
I thought that’s what the Final Fantasy games were for.
I thought those are for the ones with Moderate/Severe Depression (46%)
You obviously haven’t played:
You’re both wrong, they’re for people suffering from Gender Identity Disorder.
Hmm…OCMD (Obsessive Compulsive Math Disorder) didn’t make the list, shocking. ;-)
I’m sorry, what? I got distracted in the middle of reading.
This is something I’ve wondered about quite often. A friend, who was my roommate for three years of college, is colorblind (red/green); every now and then, the issue would come up in our gaming: matching in the card game Set, team colors in 4-team TimeSplitters 2 multiplayer matches, and a few others.
There are websites aimed at testing other sites for colorblind accessibility (example)… would it be feasible to develop a tool to create colorblindness filters for game art assets during the development process? I’m sure that most dev teams feel like they have a lot more to worry about, but I’d really love to see colorization options (and while we’re at it, good subtitles) become standard features for AAA titles in the near future.
I think a tool like that would be useful. I’ve used screenshots run through photoshop filters to mimic different forms of colorblindness to point out issues before. The biggest hurdle would be convincing development houses that this is a problem that deserves attention and is easy enough to fix.
I think it would be best, and probably the least feasible option, to have some way to run the game with filters, so a QA person could see how the game looks during gameplay and identify issues that might not be immediately recognizable from static assets.
Ben Heckendorn (of VCSp fame) is doing his part for disabled gamers.
I cannot believe they actually put a picture of him on the box. But the language translation isn’t done yet in that picture, so maybe they’ll use a better photo at least.
Seems like a problem that could be dealt-with in a uniform fashion fairly easily… just a reasonable color mapping from red/green to something else and smack the filter on at the end. For instance, all reds compressed into the low third of the red hue, all greens into the upper third of the red hue (or whatever portion of the green hue that maps over to upper third of red hue for color blind people), and the middle left open for contrast. You could reasonably do it at the graphics driver (OS, desktop, etc) level, so that a color-blind person’s screen always displays with at least with some contrast, across all applications.
I guess it would all look off, but I would think off is better than indistinguishable.
If you have a colorblind friend, what you need to do is wait until a punkish looking dude with a red or green shirt walks by, then be all like, “Holy fuck, dude, I can’t believe that shit. That guy’s shirt says ‘Colorblind People are Fucking Retarded’ in red (or green) letters.” and see if you can start a fight.