Color and Perception

I have to plug my friend Caleb here on his recent blog post about being a color blind gamer.  It's not something most of us think about.  As he says, "I give green Sour Patch Kids to my wife when she asks for red. Other than small things like that, I live a pretty normal life."

When it comes to games, however, it can quickly become a big deal. Not being able to distinguish between certain elements can obviously be devastating to gameplay.

I know it strikes a little close to home for me, although in a different way. My Father has Retinitis Pigmentosa and therefore has been visually impaired for the better half of his life. Besides the more obvious (and arguably more important) side effects, growing up as a kid gamer, it was always difficult to share the games that I loved with my Dad. Because of his sight, he had trouble participating or even watching me play.

I remember one specific instance where I tried to get him to play Goldeneye with me on Nintendo 64. He made a valiant effort, but in the end, I could tell that for the most part he was faking. He would do his best to respond to any flashes or change in imagery. It was just too difficult for him to see and understand everything on the screen.

Obviously anything like a first person shooter is going to be difficult for the visually impaired, but other genres might be much easier to manage. Games like Civilization might be doable but the amount of information can be overwhelming. Simpler games, such as your average Flash game, would be much more suited.

I kept many of these things in mind while developing Fugashu. I wanted my Dad to be able to play it without special help. This was one of the reasons I made the numbers nice and big, and made sure to make them contrast well with the cards. (Contrast is something he can actually see very well. Occasionally he'll pick a tiny piece of lint off of your shirt, much to your confusion.) I gave each action a specific sound. Positive actions were rewarded with a nice "bloop", but moving a card where it shouldn't go gives you a not-so-nice "bleep". Special cards all have their own sounds, to tell you when they act.

I also showed him how to make the SWF file go full screen, which meant he could play it on his computer without any kind of magnification.

It worked quite well and he's definitely Fugashu's biggest fan (although, he might be a tad biased).

I guess my point to all this is we as developers should do our very best to make our games as accessible as possible. There will always be budgets and deadlines that force us to focus on other things, but we should try to at least keep in mind how our decisions affect others. A small change might make a large difference to someone. Whatever gives us the most bang for our development time buck.

I encourage you to read Caleb's post.