Game Accessibility: Practical Visual Fixes from EA's Madden NFL Franchise

[Music] welcome to game accessibility practical fixes from EA Madden NFL franchise I'm Karen Stevens and I'm a software engineer on the Madden team Electronic Arts and occasionally I'm also a um product owner interesting story behind that so quite a few years ago I had a friend tell me I said oh I know you're a huge Raiders fan are you looking forward to playing the next version of Madden and he replied I can't play Madden I'm like well why can't you play and he's like well I'm low vision I said yeah I know he's like well that means that like anything that moves I have a really hard time seeing if it's too small so like pass icons for example or anything that moves on the field I don't have time to react I can't see it so I don't know how to catch the ball so I had to give up playing I said well I can't promise you anything but I can say this if I ever get an opportunity to do something about that I will so

fast forward to summer of 2014 uh tibron game studios EA game studios uh P an internal game Jam so my feature was Madden game accessibility and it happened to win for best feature so that allowed me to pitch the idea and get some traction and this is what came in to Madden 17 so what is accessibility disability is a mismatch between a person and their environment accessibility is correction of this mismatch by this definition you could actually say a tall person is disabled if they're on an airplane because they do not match their environment actually saying that someone has like a hearing impairment that's a medical condition that doesn't actually Define who they are so when we design software we can design it to try to include as many people as possible and that's what accessibility is here you see two charities listed

both of these Charities um and there are many others these two happen to focus mostly on configurable controllers and actual solutions for people who can't use their hands or have trouble with you know find motor skills they provide them options and that's great but Hardware only goes so far it's important to consider this at a software level too accessibility is a mindset it's not just one feature it's considering your user the entire way through CU it's really a form of usability it's cheaper to plan it than to try to tack it on as an afterthought we all know what happens when you have feature creep um things can quickly get out of scope so it's good to think about it from the very beginning and it doesn't mean that it has to be that expensive everything you saw here was done within a month almost entirely by me so I took the role of product owner

uh designer developer I did some UI placeholder art I pretty much did the whole thing um so it doesn't take much necessarily to get a bing win with your audience so why is this important well 19% of the US population currently has some form of disability 25% of today's 20-year-olds will be disabled by retirement you may wonder why these numbers don't match it is true that many people who have a disability also have health issues which may reduce the mortality rate and that's why these numbers don't quite match the presentation here is mainly focused on visual issues and it's interesting that 25 million are visually impaired and about 1 in 12 men one in 200 women are color blind and that is not included in those visually impaired numbers

so I'm sure everybody here's already used accessible feature how many people have in their game set a brightness setting contrast gamma control have you been at a bar and seen subtitles on the TV all those are accessibility settings you may want to do something like you know you have a child you don't want to wake up so you mute the TV you're eating something so you really don't want to use two hands all this are technically accessibility even though um really there is nothing disabled about you so yes as I said earlier there are many settings such as volume control that already exists now one push back I you know heard is well this is fundamentally changing your appearance of the game what if you know you go on YouTube and you see the game looks different than you would expect how are we going to communicate this so the solution was and I know it's hard to see here and which is intentional is a light Watermark that sits in the bottom

corner and it will let us know that if someone's like why is this so strange looking we can say well they have an accessibility setting turn on I can see this little Watermark and they can the settings can be used to prevent altering the original game experience so Madden without any accessibility turned on is pretty much what you would expect based on the previous versions of the series so here are the Madden accessibility settings um as I mentioned I was a oneman band for this there's a few consequences and rooms for improvement um this is a journey this is not a single step in the process so they are there but they're a little buried they're a little buried because I did the UI myself and I'm not a UI developer so I kind of just did the best I could to make sure it shipped um I'm hoping that at some point maybe we can polish that a little but this is sufficient you can turn it on turn it off works great so

size so we talked about en large now it's pretty obvious to say things should be big enough so you can see them and there should be you know enough contrast you can tell what they are this kind of puts numbers to it now I'll admit that I've been to accessibility talks this week since I started writing these slides and I saw a recommendation of instead of 30 pixels tall to use 40 I would say use as big as you can like if you can do 40 by all means that that's a great idea um I did not get that information till this week which is why it's not in the slide deck uh 30 is good too um I would not recommend smaller than 30 if you go onto forums and you look at what sizes people start to complain about you'll notice that around anything below 30 you get increasing number of compliant lower you go so I would recommend keeping things as big as possible 4.5 to1 contrast ratio is a pretty much an industry standard I know that's kind of a vague thing so I have

an addendum slide that covers tool and resources link so you can actually see what that means so as I mentioned my friend couldn't see the pass icons here's an example of what the pass icons normally look like um they're the little buttons that are above players heads this is what happens when you turn a large on so it's significantly bigger and between the two my friend was able to now play Madden again because he can now see the pass icons it doesn't just affect the pass icons it affects anything that is like a button type thing that would appear on the field in Madam so if there's like a tackle battle icon there's a catch icon all of them would be enlarged so at the same time enlarged changes the kick meter the kick meter usually lies in the field it might be angled up a little bit but it moves around depending on your camera angle

and its size can vary depending on your camera angle which can be a little hard for somebody with the visual impairment to find let alone use so to counteract that when um you turn on en large instead of it being in World space it switches to screen space so it's always in the exact Lo same location and it's large and easy to see and you know exactly where it's going to be so this made it a lot easier for people like my friend who would be like where is that thing I can't make out the line it's too thin it's too small this solves it for him and it really wasn't hard to do it took like literally this one I think only took like a day if that so reception the same time I announced the on EA's news Forum that Madden was coming out with accessibility features I also created an EA accessible Twitter account which I have on a later slide and I created an accessibility feedback

email so I can get people's um reaction and information and things so I had a better idea of how how we were meeting our users needs so it was an overwhelming positive response when they heard about these features um as you see here I know they're kind of small but like as a visually impaired person this may be the best news from EA since before CFM which is like one of our franchise modes I want to thank you for these additions I've been struggling to tell the difference between a circle and a square but no longer great addition I don't have the best eyes anymore so this makes me happy and so on and so forth it's just it was overwhelming positive which was really great to see Power postprocessing so one thing about Madden is we have lots of assets and it's really would be not really feasible for us to make an extra version of all of them to cover accessibility

so we had to come up with something that will cover the game and be adequate for our needs so looking at this put in some sort of filter that covered uh color blind brightness and contrast and it did not require any asset changes as again I said earlier it affects one in 12 men and 1 in 200 women this amounts to over half a million Madden players that's a lot of people who can't see our game very well so to illustrate exactly what this means we um the NFL kind of ran into this uh head first last season where they had an all Red Team Versus an all Green Team and this is what the two teams looked like on this TV screen uh people couldn't tell which which team was which and um since then the NFL has decided they've hired a a colorblind specialist to make sure sure that the matchups of the teams next year

can always be detected with people who are color blind well that's great for the NFL that they can do that but with Madden you can pick any uniform you want so because of that we can't do especially since people may pay real world money to use our un particular uniforms in certain cases we can't do that to them so then it becomes down to okay so how do we solve that problem we need to solve something now in addition addition to the red versus green problem we also had a UI issue multiple really here's one of the more painful ones the one the image on the left is the way a normal color version person normal vision person would see this the one on the right is somebody who has red weak color blindness as you can see the dark red arrow in particular kind of disappears the problem is is that putting red on black is actually pretty common in Madden so this was causing numerous issues not

just I'm confused in what color is it's oh I didn't know there was UI there so primary goal was to fix this I didn't know it was there if you don't know it's there it doesn't really matter what color it is so secondary goal was to make it so people would be able to tell the difference between the arrows so since I'm going to refer to this many times this is called play call this is what it looks like as you see here there's different arrows and these arrows are more than just these colors we have a wide variety of colors so here I looked at now the uh colors you want to avoid here are red orange yellow green those combinations so to ask do we ever do that in Madden we kind of do it all over the place in fact it's more common for us to do it then not do it so it was definitely an issue um some people couldn't see certain areas on the

field at all so that definitely needed to be addressed so looked at math fixes I try daliz just standard daliz it's an algorithm by Stanford University it calculates where a person's vision is weakest in color and it shifts it and reduces the color space to where it's strongest so that's great it was designed for videos and photographs and it works awesome for those cases unfortunately that's not a video game a video game has lots of really bright colors and it turns out that daliz tends to squish the colors so they're on top of each other which meant that when I applied it to play call for example we had some issues of normal vision in people not being able to tell the arrows apart so like no one can tell them apart so great idea didn't quite work so I modified it I realized that there's way you can shift the colors around so

instead of having the worst possible case scenario for games you can improve it so you can differentiate bright colors more and the way I tested this was I used play call First and I invited color blind individuals over and asked how many colors do you see and where do you see them I didn't want to lead them I didn't want to uh give them any indication what the answer would be and outside the first time I had someone go and say well these two are obviously the same color and I'm like I obviously have more work to do I'll call you back in a couple days so it took a few iterations but we got to the point where originally only about one3 of people could well relatively tell the colors to everybody could tell exactly how many colors there were and then I got feedback of oh my God why are there so many colors what did they do I thought I knew how to play this game I've been on Madden for years

and I have no idea what I'm doing so that's a good problem to have that they have work to do but that's like the best possible outcome there was a very negligible hit on game performance it was this tiny fraction of a um millisecond it really we didn't really notice it at all for those of you who are Graphics uh oriented this us for per version it did not require a full screen pass uh Madden uses FXAA to smooth out Jagged edges in gameplay so we put it on there and then we also put it on the UI that was not affected by that so just by tacking on to existing things we could shift the colors around and we didn't have to do anything else and there was that's one of the reasons why it was so cheap so bonuses is that in order to do my modified version it partially is using brightness and contrast controls which I also expose those can also help a lot of people

so here's an example of of how this changed so the image on the right and the bottom are both someone who's color blind the image on the left is the original image as you can see if you look on the Right image how the red arrows are almost gone they're very visible on the bottom image that they look more blue so this significantly helped people's ability to see everything on the screen and we had a lot of people who are now confused because they could see things they couldn't before so this is what it looks like when it's applied to the whole game for a normal vision user um as you can see it doesn't look that different it really depends on what type of color blindness you have and by the way I'm not saying this is a one fix stop fix all things first of all it had to be tuned in order for the overlap to fall in a good spot um second of all this doesn't mean that um if you're

doing pallet swapping instead that's necessarily bad I would just encourage you to to consider your background colors when you're doing that to make sure that you're not inadvertently moving the colors around and then blending into your background when you're color blind because I've seen that happen quite a bit too there really is no Silver Bullet um each approach is valid but this worked really well for Madden and it will work well for similar titles so reception this is a minor thing to most of us but people with color blindness and eye troubles it's huge um lots of thank yous lots of people saying that this is the best thing ever um it was overwhelmingly positive we have lots of people who didn't like I said didn't realize they didn't they didn't understand the game the way they expected it to to be so it was very gratifying to see that it helped so many many

people I also like I said added brightness and contrast support I support five levels of each um here's the brightness and then here's the contrast here's a bonus to the brightness and contrast so like I said there's no Silver Bullet I got an email a few weeks ago from somebody who um was complaining about I'm like did anybody who is color blind actually test this this didn't work for me I can't see it at all so I asked I'm said I'm I'm sorry you're having issues can you please ask you know tell me a little bit of information do you know what settings are you using what type of color blindness do you have and have you tried increasing the the contrast value I never heard from them again until about like oh a week ago or so and then I saw somebody reference on a twit the person referenced me on Twitter saying yeah you should talk to this person she's super helpful and I'm like oh okay so it did work for you great that's good to know

before that I'm like well I'm not going to hassle them but um yeah no so it was really useful to have that there so people who have significant issues and he that person even admitted that they had a severe form of color blindness so that was really helpful uh recap it's a mindset not a feature it really should be considered at every step in the development process it really should be considered from like the requirements phase like when we had mockups for even the current version of mad I went through with the art directors and said okay I see your mockups on the web they're like oh no those aren't real yet I'm like I know that's why we're talking about it now before we Implement them so to go through we actually corrected some things the best thing you can possibly do is correct things before you actually do them so um a lot of the biggest wins are things you'll never know about which is actually a plus

it's possible to have big wins cheaply like I said here everything here was under a month it wasn't much at all and engage your audience not just you know for warm fuzziness but like what I do is I take all this feedback in and I have a internal website I made and I compile different games into different web pages and then I can send links off to other teams saying all these people have a problem with this fee in your game we should really talk about this and it gives a lot more momentum behind it uh that's really the best way for me to get things done right now is just based on user feedback and it gives an idea of where our pain points are and I would encourage you all to do something it could be as simple as setting up a Twitter account that's what I did to just get information from your audience and find out what they really need so the Twitter account is EA accessible I recommend following it if

you're interested in future updates on anything to do with accessibility um for Madden accessibility feedback ea.com is the email that's used um externally for Gathering feedback um if you don't remember that if you remember the Twitter account the email is listed in the profile of the Twitter account so there are additional slides in this deck that cover tool and reference links so here's some examples don't worry it's in the vault by the way so you don't have to worry about that too much if you can't access it I've already been given permission to share it externally so if you go back to the accessibility feedback or the Twitter either way and give me your contact information and you I'll make sure you get it so and here's the funny part the code's actually in the slide deck so the uh brightness contrast and all this is uh literally small enough to be in the

notes all of it is actually in a note if you get the PDF files the um PDF files the last couple of pages of the PDF is the code and yes I did clear this with legal first um if you have any questions about using it or questions legal questions about it once again contact me and I'll make sure you get in touch with the right people you've probably a lot of you may have already spoken to me because I've been walking the floor saying have you considered collar blind support um and been handing out literal P packets of paper if any of you would like a packet now I have a few left not many but a few um so yes I would say definitely look in the vault and uh yes thank you does anybody have any questions no questions you have a question hello uh as you know I also worked on a title where we retrofitted um some ability features um but I was

wondering so one of the things that I kept running into was uh it would be a feature but it would be a feature outside my team um you know not my group of developers I was working with but you know with someone else so how do how do you go about um you kind of mentioned talking to some of the other teams but when you find something that isn't yours that you need uh you realize that it could be more accessible how do you kind of start that conversation so unfortunately the I first of all I'm hearing impaired um second of all the echo is distorting your voice so um I'm not until can you come closer and I'll repeat your question so when you find an accessibility feature um or something that isn't accessible and you want to get it updated but it's not within like your team you kind of mentioned already talking to some of the other teams like how do you go about like working with people outs outside your group to get cool the question is if I got feedback from a team other than Madden how do I go about getting that information back to the team couple of ways um first of

all about a year ago I created an internal email list so people inside of uh EA who are particularly interested in accessibility are on it which covers actually a surprising good cross-section of the company so that gives me a starting point of contacting other teams and usually based on that I can find the right person and I just have a list of names basically at this point where I go to to get feedback yes so it's kind of related to the last question um so other teams that you passed on feedback to what has their response to it been their reaction have you got any tips for others want to do the same thing so the question was um how do other teams react to getting feedback they've been pretty good about it really I mean generally speaking people want to know if people are having trouble using your software none of us are sitting down saying I want to write games that people can't use so um

generally speaking they're they're pretty interested in finding out what people are having trouble with and uh yeah it doesn't necessarily mean things move quickly um just because they are all big games they're all trip like pretty much all AAA titles and it's can take a while so it doesn't mean necessarily something is going to be hit immediately but at least they're aware of it and have the opportunity to address it which they wouldn't otherwise anything else no okay then well thank you all so much for coming