Stupid question for colour-blind gamers: why do accessibility options in games remove and mute colours to simulate colour blindness types? (i.e. protanopia, deuteranopia, etc.)
I imagine if you can’t perceive some colours, you want hue shift or boost, not to actually remove colours so it looks like what you already are seeing. Feels a bit like muting all sounds to help one with auditory deficiencies. What am I missing here?
Yes I always felt those accessibility options are actually simulation options for non-colourblind people, and no one uses them. I’ve seen them in half a dozen games though, so it cannot be really a mistake.
Suppose you can distinguish 16 colors. Somebody else can distinguish only 4. To accommodate the sees-only-4-colors person, you need to make sure that game elements are not differentiated by colors that look the same to the sees-only-4-colors person. One way to do this is to choose a color palette having only 4 colors and designing the game to still make sense that way. Also make sure that sees-only-4-colors can distinguish the 4 colors you chose.
Boosting contrast won't help you if you can't tell the difference, so you actually want to shift colors away from the ambiguous axis. This necessarily has the effect of removing certain colors.
Not exactly. It’s not that I can’t see the colors, I just need more contrast to pick up red or green. A grayish green looks the same as plain gray to me. A small bright green dot? Might as well be gray or brown. But a large, solid area of bright green or red? No problem at all.
You can also overlay hints, for example different shadow ditherings depending on color ? Im actually pro ambivalent colors as this is what feels natural for somebody color mismatching.
The advantage of these large corporations is good stuff like this that a smaller company couldn’t afford. Like how Disney World is in bending over backward to be accessible for my daughter in a wheelchair. This sort of thing is an objective good.
The problem with their games is in being such big tent trying to appeal to everyone (note I’m not talking about accessibility, which is a totally different axis), they feel too smoothed out and have very little interesting to say, and their games just aren’t that much fun.
It reminds me of that article posted on HN the other day saying that often our weaknesses and strengths are two sides of the same coin.
Ubisoft is a huge corporation(I used to work there) - there are projects which are money makers and which have to be smoothed out and appeal to the largest possible group of people, but there is still a crazy amount of creativity happening in various corners of the company. For every Assassin's Creed there are 10 projects being worked on out of which maybe 1 will actually come out - generally if you can pitch an idea within your studio there is a good chance you will get internal funding for 6-12 months to work on it with a small group of other people. Passing other milestones on the way to release is much harder, but this kind of "work on anything and see if it works" approach is very much encouraged. OddBallers and RollerChampions being probably some of the better examples lately, and Grow Home much earlier.
Accessibility typically doesn't cost much. With many modern OS UI frameworks, you get it for free as long as you don't go out of your way to customize shit that you probably shouldn't be customizing in the first place. If you stick to standard controls and not try to use crazy ways to override user preferences, your application should be accessible to things like screen readers mostly out of the box.
With the popularity of indie games I wonder why publishers don’t just try and buy out hundreds of these small devs under their shop. And I’m not talking like how when ea buys dice and ruins dice. That is the whole problem. Total autonomy should be offered. The publisher should exist solely as a balancer of budgets: skim profit when sales happen to pay for shops when dev work before a sale is to be done. No different than say a city department paying into the general fund and other department supported by the general fund.
"I mean, Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes that everybody liked. They left that to the Bee Gees."
AAA is going to regress toward slop as the number of cooks in the kitchen increases, not just counting people who work directly on the game but investors, members of the ESG committee from the bank issuing loans to the studio, etc.
The next bellwether: Bungie's Marathon (2025). Marathon (1994) was a neat game that expanded upon "Doom-likes" as they were called with new engine features, multiplayer modes, and (gasp!) lore that you could unlock. It was specific. It had a vision. Marathon (2025) is a multiplayer-only, generic characters, generic settings, generic objectives. Basically Sony is turning Bungie into a dumping ground for devs on the failed Concord.
Glad they're open-sourcing it, since "Accessibility" falls under the umbrella of the dreaded "DEI", which means we can expect to see any government-funding for it dry up.
Luckily Ubisoft is (mostly) European so it should avoid the events in the US. I'm sure the the anti-progressives will eventually start making headway in Europe but so far the Continent at least seems to have stayed sane. I could be wrong about this but i don't think I've seen the slept agenda being pushed anywhere other than the U.K.
I'm pro-accessibility and have contributed privately to blind developer initiatives. Unfortunately Ubisoft insists on implement user-hostile accessibility that screams at the user using voice-to-text when they open their games and is quite difficult to get through even as an abled user.
How about Ubisoft work with Sony/Microsoft/Valve and get vision and hearing disability implemented at the device level rather than harassing abled users every new game which I'm sure through this frustration is contributing in some small way to these anti-intellectual movements against accessibility.
Does anyone have any insight into how tools for simulating color blindness would fit into workflows?
For example, in this case presumably the QA team play in different modes and provide feedback about things which aren't going to work, but that is a very different universe than web or mobile app design.
Most colorblind people are so-called "anamolous trichromats" who have 3 functioning color channels, but one or more has some kind of deficiency. Instead of being completely unable to distinguish UI elements, they might simply take longer at it, or more likely to spend 10 extra minutes hunting for the red key the boss dropped in the grass.
Does anyone know a tool that assessed which type of colorblindness you have? The tool here seems great, but when I want to explain to people how I see colors, I don’t know which deficiency to choose.
However, to properly screen for color vision deficiencies requires calibrated spectra. Thus, even a color-calibrated monitor is insufficient, since color calibration assumes that the standard cone response functions are valid, which isn't the case for anomalous trichromats (which encompasses the most common types of colorblindness). This is why screening, such as with the HRR test, is done with plates printed with spectrally-calibrated inks in controlled lightning conditions (again with a known spectrum).
With something like Reshade shaders can be injected into any game without modifying any engine / game code. Would work much like this tool from Ubisoft.
But what does that give me? Why would I need to simulate color blindness in an already released title? In my opinion that's simply a developer tool.
What would've been more useful here would be a color blindness compensation filter, but IIRC there are already tools that can do just that for the whole screen.
I would assume that most of the code is the way it is because "helping users flag accessibility concerns in real-time" in the about implies that they are play testing games using Chroma on top. Using OBS for this would require insane bitrate and tight latency restraints that do not sound very achievable.
Also, at no point does it look like they are actually recording anything. Just screenshots.
This might be to placate the "where's the .exe?" crowd. A release and a hint where to find the .exe might have been more appropriate, but I doubt they will use this repo for development: there is no sign of branches, tags or other contributors.
The shader code in Chroma looks to be a direct copy/paste from this old repo: https://github.com/Chman/ColorBlindr/blob/master/ColorBlindr....
I don't see it being referenced anywhere but maybe I'm mistaken.
Not for gaming, but this was developed for checking plots: https://github.com/hdembinski/monolens
And works cross platform.
I have used Chromatic Vision Simulator on my iPhone with a camera to check for colour-blind accessibility of board games.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chromatic-vision-simulator/id3...
It's free. I'm unaffiliated, just a happy user in the past.
Stupid question for colour-blind gamers: why do accessibility options in games remove and mute colours to simulate colour blindness types? (i.e. protanopia, deuteranopia, etc.)
I imagine if you can’t perceive some colours, you want hue shift or boost, not to actually remove colours so it looks like what you already are seeing. Feels a bit like muting all sounds to help one with auditory deficiencies. What am I missing here?
You're missing nothing, that's just a badly designed feature (hello Doom 2016). Or rather a badly named feature.
To give the benefit of doubt: maybe it's a simulator that the dev used for testing that got left in production ?
Yes I always felt those accessibility options are actually simulation options for non-colourblind people, and no one uses them. I’ve seen them in half a dozen games though, so it cannot be really a mistake.
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Suppose you can distinguish 16 colors. Somebody else can distinguish only 4. To accommodate the sees-only-4-colors person, you need to make sure that game elements are not differentiated by colors that look the same to the sees-only-4-colors person. One way to do this is to choose a color palette having only 4 colors and designing the game to still make sense that way. Also make sure that sees-only-4-colors can distinguish the 4 colors you chose.
Is it though? This is the deuteranopia (red-green blindness) option in Destiny
https://www.gamersexperience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/...
The red and green icons are still prominently there. If one is red-green blind, shouldn’t those icons be any other hue than green and red?
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Boosting contrast won't help you if you can't tell the difference, so you actually want to shift colors away from the ambiguous axis. This necessarily has the effect of removing certain colors.
Not exactly. It’s not that I can’t see the colors, I just need more contrast to pick up red or green. A grayish green looks the same as plain gray to me. A small bright green dot? Might as well be gray or brown. But a large, solid area of bright green or red? No problem at all.
1 reply →
You can also overlay hints, for example different shadow ditherings depending on color ? Im actually pro ambivalent colors as this is what feels natural for somebody color mismatching.
1 reply →
Ubisoft is on the forefront for accessibility.
The advantage of these large corporations is good stuff like this that a smaller company couldn’t afford. Like how Disney World is in bending over backward to be accessible for my daughter in a wheelchair. This sort of thing is an objective good.
The problem with their games is in being such big tent trying to appeal to everyone (note I’m not talking about accessibility, which is a totally different axis), they feel too smoothed out and have very little interesting to say, and their games just aren’t that much fun.
It reminds me of that article posted on HN the other day saying that often our weaknesses and strengths are two sides of the same coin.
Ubisoft is a huge corporation(I used to work there) - there are projects which are money makers and which have to be smoothed out and appeal to the largest possible group of people, but there is still a crazy amount of creativity happening in various corners of the company. For every Assassin's Creed there are 10 projects being worked on out of which maybe 1 will actually come out - generally if you can pitch an idea within your studio there is a good chance you will get internal funding for 6-12 months to work on it with a small group of other people. Passing other milestones on the way to release is much harder, but this kind of "work on anything and see if it works" approach is very much encouraged. OddBallers and RollerChampions being probably some of the better examples lately, and Grow Home much earlier.
Accessibility typically doesn't cost much. With many modern OS UI frameworks, you get it for free as long as you don't go out of your way to customize shit that you probably shouldn't be customizing in the first place. If you stick to standard controls and not try to use crazy ways to override user preferences, your application should be accessible to things like screen readers mostly out of the box.
2 replies →
With the popularity of indie games I wonder why publishers don’t just try and buy out hundreds of these small devs under their shop. And I’m not talking like how when ea buys dice and ruins dice. That is the whole problem. Total autonomy should be offered. The publisher should exist solely as a balancer of budgets: skim profit when sales happen to pay for shops when dev work before a sale is to be done. No different than say a city department paying into the general fund and other department supported by the general fund.
4 replies →
"I mean, Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes that everybody liked. They left that to the Bee Gees."
AAA is going to regress toward slop as the number of cooks in the kitchen increases, not just counting people who work directly on the game but investors, members of the ESG committee from the bank issuing loans to the studio, etc.
The next bellwether: Bungie's Marathon (2025). Marathon (1994) was a neat game that expanded upon "Doom-likes" as they were called with new engine features, multiplayer modes, and (gasp!) lore that you could unlock. It was specific. It had a vision. Marathon (2025) is a multiplayer-only, generic characters, generic settings, generic objectives. Basically Sony is turning Bungie into a dumping ground for devs on the failed Concord.
Glad they're open-sourcing it, since "Accessibility" falls under the umbrella of the dreaded "DEI", which means we can expect to see any government-funding for it dry up.
Luckily Ubisoft is (mostly) European so it should avoid the events in the US. I'm sure the the anti-progressives will eventually start making headway in Europe but so far the Continent at least seems to have stayed sane. I could be wrong about this but i don't think I've seen the slept agenda being pushed anywhere other than the U.K.
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Microsoft is well up there too.
That's good, but it's sad that it's the only good thing that can be said about them...
I'm pro-accessibility and have contributed privately to blind developer initiatives. Unfortunately Ubisoft insists on implement user-hostile accessibility that screams at the user using voice-to-text when they open their games and is quite difficult to get through even as an abled user.
How about Ubisoft work with Sony/Microsoft/Valve and get vision and hearing disability implemented at the device level rather than harassing abled users every new game which I'm sure through this frustration is contributing in some small way to these anti-intellectual movements against accessibility.
Does anyone have any insight into how tools for simulating color blindness would fit into workflows?
For example, in this case presumably the QA team play in different modes and provide feedback about things which aren't going to work, but that is a very different universe than web or mobile app design.
could you use it during user validation testing? see if they can distinguish buttons etc?
Most colorblind people are so-called "anamolous trichromats" who have 3 functioning color channels, but one or more has some kind of deficiency. Instead of being completely unable to distinguish UI elements, they might simply take longer at it, or more likely to spend 10 extra minutes hunting for the red key the boss dropped in the grass.
That's more subtle to test.
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Does anyone know a tool that assessed which type of colorblindness you have? The tool here seems great, but when I want to explain to people how I see colors, I don’t know which deficiency to choose.
Figure 24 in Paul Tol's Notes is a reasonable thing to try: https://web.archive.org/web/20250201164619/https://personal....
However, to properly screen for color vision deficiencies requires calibrated spectra. Thus, even a color-calibrated monitor is insufficient, since color calibration assumes that the standard cone response functions are valid, which isn't the case for anomalous trichromats (which encompasses the most common types of colorblindness). This is why screening, such as with the HRR test, is done with plates printed with spectrally-calibrated inks in controlled lightning conditions (again with a known spectrum).
Alternatively, one could just use this shader for post-processing in their engine: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdtyzM
Second key feature listed in the repo:
> Work on all games. No dependency on any specific game or engine.
So your solution isn't an alternative here since it requires modifying the engine/game code.
With something like Reshade shaders can be injected into any game without modifying any engine / game code. Would work much like this tool from Ubisoft.
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But what does that give me? Why would I need to simulate color blindness in an already released title? In my opinion that's simply a developer tool.
What would've been more useful here would be a color blindness compensation filter, but IIRC there are already tools that can do just that for the whole screen.
2 replies →
That's funny, the shader doesn't appear to be doing anything…
This seems overly complex. Why require input passthrough?
It seems simpler to make an OBS plugin that way you are able to reuse a lot of work that already exists for game capture and post processing.
I would assume that most of the code is the way it is because "helping users flag accessibility concerns in real-time" in the about implies that they are play testing games using Chroma on top. Using OBS for this would require insane bitrate and tight latency restraints that do not sound very achievable.
Also, at no point does it look like they are actually recording anything. Just screenshots.
I never mentioned recording or streaming. You can have OBS preview a scene with filters. Plenty of streamers have played games via an OBS preview.
They aren't using GitHub correctly, so they have the installer for Windows in-tree.
https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma/blob/main/Release/Chroma_s...
This might be to placate the "where's the .exe?" crowd. A release and a hint where to find the .exe might have been more appropriate, but I doubt they will use this repo for development: there is no sign of branches, tags or other contributors.
Or rather they probably just dumped the project to a fresh git repo since their internal tooling probably handles binblob diffing in VCS.
You're too pedantic, there are valid reasons to do so
What would be those? Serious question, not picking a fight.
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They are using Git correctly.