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Video game makers aren’t catering for gamers with disabilities, study finds
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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some stuff like colour blindness filter settings would take them like 10 minutes to implement >_>
You've never worked in software development, have you? Adding colorblind modes isn't as simple as just adding a filter and calling it a day. UIs have to be redesigned for each colorblind mode you add.
Do you have text in a menu that says "Click the red button"? Gotta change that for each colorblind mode. Also gotta change that for each language you write the game in. Can the user adjust the settings on the UI, themselves? Then you've gotta account for user-adjusted settings, too. Does the UI change itself depending on the context of things happening in the game? Gotta have alternates set up for those, too. Does a voice-acted character refer to the colors of anything that may be impacted by colorblind modes? Gotta record extra dialogue for those, too.
Each of those stack on top of each other, and take a lot more time and effort than you're making it out to be. Not saying it's an impossible task, but it's far from a 10-minute implementation. Very rarely is the solution "just a few lines of code" like people tend to think.
I mean, you can always just follow reasonable contrast advice from square 1, and colorblindness won't be an issue. It's a pretty solved problem in the web world if people are willing to actually give a damn about it. You can have red and green text and buttons all across the screen as long as their contrast is enough that color-blind users can differentiate them.
Adding colorblind mode to a product you've already spent years on saying "fuck colorblind people, I don't care about them". Yeah, that's not so easy.
Or, hear me out here, maybe don’t use colors from jump that a lot of folks with colorblindness can’t differentiate. Red-green colorblindness is the most common, but games keep using those colors for puzzles instead of picking different colors.
Closer to a week or two, speaking as an actual software dev.
You have to first include the investigation into "how do we do it? What our are best options?" which is a day or two
Then the couple meetings as you go over your findings and get the sign off and approval that you can go ahead with it.
Then a couple days to implement it, write some tests for the code.
Another day for all the documentation to be added to Confluence, detailing all the above.
Another day or two for the code review process back and forth.
Another day or two for the QA testers to validate things are working.
There's many many steps involved in going from "Idea" to "Implemented, reviewed, and tested", and the human element in the back and forth stretches it out as you wait for people to take their lunch breaks, join the zoom meeting, the usual "your mic is muted mate" "oh jeez sorry" back and forth, etc etc...
Thank god I haven't worked at a company like that in years (well, the "findings meetings" part of that at least)
But then, I wouldn't want to be held to a 2-week deadline adding context-aware colorblindness support to an otherwise finished project.
Color blindness settings and subtitles is really such a low bar, it's crazy to think plenty don't even bother with that
You have to be able to convey business value to get approval on anything corporate deems "extra"
At the end of the day, the project manager is going to have to be able to "prove" that color blind settings will translate to $$$ to the people above them, and not only that, but reliably more $$$ than it will cost to implement.
Which means first you need to know how much money it actually is likely to make, and we have actually very little data on what % of gamers that enjoy (genre) are colorblind.
So you're already off to a pretty dang rough start.
Usually you only actually get these features when the CEO themself has buy in, like, "Oh yeah my cousin is colorblind and told me how much games suck about it, so make sure we include that feature"
Thats pretty much the only way you'll be seeing that sort of inclusivity, when you have direct buy in to the movement of inclusivity coming from the very top at a company culture level.
I'd say the lowest bars are letting people change controller bindings and not adding features that rely purely on colour.
These days, I just rebind buttons in SteamInput.
Using a Steamdeck, I actually prefer that than to deal with whatever rebinding UI the game might have.
There's some things like action layers that I don't expect game makers to ever implement.
Oh! Oh thank you, You make a very good point. It's very late and I was thinking that people were complaining that there weren't enough characters in wheelchairs in the last of us for a second or something like that.
Why did your comment remind me of ClapTrap from Borderlands 2? Specifically the scene where you walk along together and suddenly you have to walk stairs and he goes like STAIRS?! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! How did you know stairs were my ONLY weakness?!
LMAO
Don't worry, when there's nothing to outrage about, that will be next.
When you post and get the devs coming out saying 10 minutes is not reflective of the true amount of time it takes to make 1s and 0s exclusive 🙄
Because half-assing the implementation is the way to go
Let's deliver a broken version of accessibility in 10 minutes, that's much better.
No, simply adding "colour filters" isn't a fix either, and if that was the fix then a game wouldn't even need to do that, there are plenty of apps that can already do that, a game doesn't need to do anything for that (similar to how your screen warmth can change when it becomes night), reshade as an example of something that can do just that.
But thinking about the problem is ofcourse too hard, it's easier to whine about it and act like you know how simple it is. But when we implement accessibly we do think about it, because people with accessibility issues deserve to get something that actually helps rather than the "10 minute solution"