Solving an Invisible Problem: Designing for Color-Blindness in Games

[Music] today we're going to explore colorblindness in detail and that I'd like to take the risk could you raise your hands if you got your cells are colorblind as if you and for everyone else if you personally know someone who is colorblind that's pretty much everyone was one of the other cool so hopefully you can learn something to help yourselves and the people around you today so a little introduction on Who I am and what I'm doing up here so my name is Douglas Penance I work at the Creative Assembly in the United Kingdom a short path of my career so I started off in the games industry in 2010 as a QA tester at Microsoft over in England and I am now a I'm now an associate development manager so first wrong with the production team at the Creative Assembly on their console team working

on our unannounced IP and I am colorblind I have severe deuteron Opia like I think it is severe and the this shows up in a fab that I talk about it so much there's a lot of people were quite quiet about that colorblindness they don't think there's they don't realize how much it's affecting their lives it's not a very well understood condition even though the name is so widely spoken so what I'm going to cover today so I'm gonna talk about exactly what color blindness is and there are gonna be lots and lots of pictures take as many photos as you like and so will try to understand the condition some more then we'll cut this is a games conference and we want to know what is color blindness due to the games we make how does it affect the player experience and then I'm going to drill down into some of the issues with Halo Wars - one of the that was the last project that my team released and some of the color issues that this had and also going into details of why it's even if we

understand the condition what are some of the roadblocks to actually developing for color blindness and then of course as many solutions as I can give you places where they've been used well somewhere they've been used partially well and some guidelines you can take to apply to your own games so straight to the condition so what exactly is colorblindness the simplest definition I could find is the inability or decreased ability to distinguish certain colors this doesn't simply mean seeing in black and white so but before before the disability how do we see color normally so in our eyes we have two types of photoreceptor cells we have rods and we have cones the rods detect low level light so these is this is your night vision mic which you don't have very good color in your night vision the rods just pick up effectively on a black and white and so low level lights to kind of help you survive and they talked about many animals being color blind they have rods they are effective at low

level vision they don't need the color yeah cones are where we get all our color from so they detect intense light and we have three types of them we have our red cones our blue cones and our green cones and all the colors we see are combinations of these three hues in one way or another and if you're lucky enough to have normal color vision this is known as trichromacy it's a three chromatic so there are multiple types of color blindness as well so more than just more than just even three so we have Deuter anomaly proto normally trite anomaly and these are known as anomalous trichromacy this is where there is a defect with the cones in your eyes one of the types of cones but but you still have those cells then there is deuteron Opia which I suffer from protanopia and Triton OPA these are dichromacy one of

the coat one of the types of cones is basically missing and the the different names are depending on which cone is missing so deuteron topia is well I'll go into some more detail shortly I mentioned that this doesn't mean we see in black and white but there are some people that do this is a very rare condition it is called achromatopsia and it is of course monochromatic and this this only affects roughly one in 30,000 people except in one place in the world there is an island in Pingala it's in Micronesia in the Pacific and around 25 percent of their population have a Croma top SIA this was because of a national natural disaster that wiped out most of the island and in repopulating one of the one of the survivors had a Croma top SIA and then this became this have was passed down to a large part of the population through the genetics so I'm

going to focus on these three because supporting due to an obeah protanopia and Triton Opia accommodates for the anomalous trichromacy is above because there these are the most extreme versions of them so that's tough to turn up here which is of those of you that raised your hands and said you were color blind this is probably you this is the most common type of red-green color blindness in effects yeah of all of all color blind men this is around 75% of them and I say males quite specifically and I'll explain why shortly so this is a reduced sensitivity to green light I know it can be known as green blindness and what you can often expect if you have this condition is reds greens and browns will be confused blue greens and Gray's light greens and yellows I didn't know lime green existed until I read it on the back of my gameboy color as a child and that they they nicely embossed it I'd thought for about two years it

was yellow and reds oranges in the others of course and yes and even some blues purples and dark Pink's I don't see pink much it tends to be white then er as protanopia this is another kind of red-green color blindness so we have the two but it's far less common so this is around a quarter of colorblind men roughly so this is all this is all about red light reduced sensitivity and so these people confuse black with red so the intensity of red is greatly diminished and the difference here can be like it's like the difference between a light being on or off and so black like for the purposes of colorblindness we have to consider black a color Browns greens reds and oranges often get blood as well quite a lot of crossover with deuteron Opia blues purples and dark pinks and many reds and oranges of course very dim and the third one much rarer is tritone OPA so this

this is very rare indeed this is only around one in 10,000 people although I I have I have met once right - nope on this trip so far they were with us on the train jam and this affects men and women equally because this is on this is affected by a different chromosome to the other types of colorblindness this is on chromosome 7 and this is not rather than the x and y and this is equal between men and women and this is also this focus is on a reduced sensitivity to blue and yellow light and so it's not unheard those aren't many people they don't speak up about the issue and so we people don't expect these problems so blue greens and Grey's are problem dark purples they can become black and oranges with Reds so where does this come from so little biology lesson men have an X chromosome and the

Y chromosome women have two X chromosomes the advantage of this is that if there is a defect on an x chromosome for a woman if the chromosome is fine on the other one she does not suffer from the condition there are many conditions that are more prevalent in men for this very reason because if I have a problem on my X chromosome and I do my Y chromosome can't compensate it doesn't have the doesn't have a reflective chromosomes to back it up and so colorblindness is mostly hereditary due to an opiate and proton protanopia are a defect on the X chromosome and so this is passed down and this will be passed down to men this Kurt and it has to come from their mother in the head in this case because a man passes a Y chromosome to their son and a woman can be a carrier and it's then basically a 50/50 chance - she passed the defective X chromosome to her son for a woman to be colorblind of one of these - her father must be

colorblind because that X chromosome must come down and then it's a 50/50 from her mother if a mother is colorblind and her father is colorblind she's getting it I am sorry Triton appear of course is different this is defective chromosome seven this is not this is not a sexual chromosome but also this one can be triggered by other issues in the brain so there can be illnesses and injuries and some medications can cause Triton o P like symptoms and also age so and as you grow older like am your eyes change quite a lot as many people know you're likely to get more long-sighted likely to need glasses but you're also likely to lose your sensitivity to blue and yellow light and so in a way designed for colorblindness is designing for you just not yet so it's different around the world as well so across the world around one in 12 men are colorblind around 8% of men across the earth only one in 200

women nothing but when you when you scale up the numbers to a so if you have a million players with a roughly 50/50 gender split you would you will statistically expect colorblindness in over 40,000 of your male players and about 2,500 of your female players that is if you have a million last I checked fortnight has as of November 125 million players so there's a lot of players that can benefit from these features the sorts of changes depending on geography so in Caucasian populations this is genetic it stays in the family and it's much more common so in Scandinavian minutes around ten to eleven percent whereas in Asian men it's only around five and in Africa it's only around four percent so that's where it is that's what has caused what happens when you're colorblind and are in short

life is a bit weird so there are lots of things that I there are lots of things that I just can't see and can't do very well so when I'm cooking meat I generally overcook it just to be safe because I can't see when it is brown properly like raw meat and cook me so often look the same I've been called out for eating chicken that no that's not cooked yet it's a little worrying any any LEDs any lights on anything like her on microphones on routers or like um any other devices you have a home the lights because they're so they're so bright they just all start to look the same along red green yellow orange it's just all of the same and fun fact this is a screenshot from my phone that for ages I was when I first got the new phone I would get a call and I would try to answer it and then the call would drop and I didn't know why it was getting really annoying and then after a while I realized I'm pressing the wrong damn

button because even though I like even though there are two other parts of the language there like the affirmative button is on the that is on the left as usual and the it looks like that the receiver is picking it up and in in the stress of the moment even I knowing I'm color blind I still go for the color and I went for the button I thought was green which was the wrong one so I was hanging up loads and loads of calls and I didn't know why fashion is a bit of a write-off I quite like that while I like one step is that there are labels in clothing to say which colors they are that doesn't mean I know which colors go with what so I know if I do want to try and dress fashionably I genuinely need help better or I just wear grey all the time apparently that's something cool is that burgundy right a mythical creature called burgundy I'll take your word for it and then same goes for like there are

lots of people around GDC with different colors of hair and I've no idea what it is like and I see a lot of what may or may not be blue purple or turquoise hair or pink like I and it's like Schrodinger's hair color is one of those I don't know which one and if this is embarrassing to only one I don't know that either I only a few years ago I realized that blushing is real I thought it was in caught it was a cartoon thing like I and it was only a few years ago I realized wait it's real but the colorblindness stops me from seeing it and its really annoying this social cue that for all this time I could have been using and like understanding people this one get this one came up last year actually this one this one affected a lot of people so the uniforms in the this is called soccer like I'm used to calling it football everything was going wrong here so the two players were being indistinguishable

from each other with the colorblindness and also some of the players they looked like the pitch right they blend into the green of the grass so it's not just distinguishing I know element a from element B but it's both elements from the environment and this is actually very trans translatable the games there's something else that I've never seen I've never seen that that's not what I'd identify as like in my eyes that's not what my skin color looks like I look like this like and so do all of you by the way I know a bit other people have looked at the simulators I see and they like to see my colorblindness not like Oh everybody's green okay yeah when I was in primary school I thought my friends had green skin because normally you don't have to tell children nobody's green I was just going by what I could see and turn to accommodate for the other types of colorblindness this is how they identify so this is our

prototype see themselves how try to nope see themselves right no it can make medical emergencies are often missing a lot of information I've had someone fainting in front of me before like and a skin white as a sheet and I had no idea there was anything wrong with him like I know until the one of the ladies from brown came in I was like oh my god I'm getting the nurse better he was like it's fine in the end so a lot of people have some ideas and assumptions about color blindness and what it can and cannot you do so the question can you drive and the answer it so can you distinct with traffic lights and your answer is generally yes like the traffic light systems are generally pretty well thought out at night red and yellow light red and amber lights will often look the same but because of the pattern and the timing of them it doesn't matter like so for me if if I can see the green light that means go if I could see the flashing yellow lights at least in UK that means go everything asked me to stop and so it's

absolutely fine so we're good and now this one a lot of people bring up and this was popularized by the film Little Miss Sunshine one of the characters colorblind wanted to be a pilot and we're told he can't be a pilot if you're colorblind but it's not true and the answer is it's maybe it's like it depends on the strength of your colorblindness and how intense it is so you would be you can expect to be tested as an individual against the symbols and stuff they have so if you can practically handle their stuff even colorblind people comply planes now this is my favorite slide does everyone recognize this yeah okay we're doing this okay raise your hands if you see a black and blue dress have a look around okay hands down and those that see white and gold that is about 50/50 that's amazing I love it I see that it's it's

not that different but when this happened this was the best week of my life but because because this was it was like the world went colorblind for about a week and had no idea how to handle it because I'm I've I don't remember not knowing I was color blind i I find I found out very early in life the question why have you drawn the see purple Doug I haven't it's blue it it leads to a diagnosis fairly quickly but but what this also means is knowing that I've been color blind the whole time is knowledge that what I'm seeing might not be real might not be right and I'm used to that I'm used to the I'm used to told actually no that's not what this is this thing that's right in front of your eyes but people with normal vision normal color vision they're not used to that I had a really curious experience I was helping out some medical students exams as like a dummy patient and one of

the things they had to do was giving a colorblind test so they said Kate Duggan like he's actually color blind and so so the student comes they have around seven minutes to run the Ishihara plate test which is the dots in the circles that you see quite often and then they have about seven minutes to do that and then I'll move on to something else one of the students finished quite quickly so went through the diagnosis it was fine and I was sat there with him and the examiner and I had time I I asked what does do you guys see anything in this plate so it was one of their place that I knew where because of my color blindness I could see the number is very cleverly made but the language was interesting in the response they didn't say I can't see a number they said there was no number there and I said well I can see a number and they said no there is no number there and that they're not used to this like they're not used to the idea that and they used it like if they can see it it's there and that's all there is it was really interesting it's like a little to the Safa call and I step up to me isn't right okay let's

talk about video games so this is going to cover a few of the common issues in video games not all of them because we make games new every time and so we reinvent our problems every time so but what we can expect is team colors are very common issues blending UI and characters in the environment like in the soccer game this is common and as an issue cuz it puzzles color matching puzzles clearly and lots and lots and lots in the UI information I know we like color it's so fast it feels so intuitive but it's exactly where I lose the problem so so first example this is battlefield 3 we're going back a few years now so I was a huge fan of battlefield 2 and 2142 and I never had any problems there color differences at the time blue was friendly yellow was squad mate red was enemy I just needed to shoot the red guys that's fine but this but they changed it

in battlefield 3 so squad mates were I think you know I don't actually know squad mates were green and the enemies were yellow or is it the other way around or was one of them orange I don't know for me they were basically the same so I bought this game and there were no colorblind modes there was nothing and so and I couldn't play it like I could try and contextually figure out like an eye right I know someone went up there is that one of the guys is he on my mini-map but over a bit I've already been shot these kids know how to shoot but um yeah and that was kind of heartbreaking for me because I really loved the Battlefield series up to then and then it was just roadblock I couldn't go any further that another shooter overwatch so this one I overwatch is incredibly busy incredibly complicating you can choose your own skins like which are all different colors and it creates a very complex colored landscape and it all just starts to blend together so like those of you that can recognize Reaper and they're

there on the left and a black cloak I can't I can't tell his team color because the red hue over its just kind of blends it and it's not as intense as it needs to be and then even the UI above them kind of blends into different parts of the environment it's not clear and similarly puzzles so it's straightforward enough color matching is difficult like I that that one in the bottom right is where I I just see those colors and I just give up like I can see too many colors that I know for a fact I get wrong all the time and I don't under is no way for me to get the right you are information so and using depth of hue and deepness of hue is so common that it feel it feels so good because it's it's a piece of information that if you're if you're trichromatic you feel it I understand why it's great but I can't I can't see it like the like the greens like so this

is from MechWarrior and the green parts are the healthiest parts and yellow is in the middle and then red is your mech is breaking down and the healthiest look like the unhealthiest and it's uh it takes away my ability to make decisions in the game and this was a puzzle from fable 3 I think this was making the pies and I had to match I had to match colors and I couldn't really tell and someone was saying well they're just the same colors as on the Xbox controller it's not are they I'll take your word for it it still doesn't help me hmm even then in panel Fantasy 7 I never considered that like for me it was just a bunch of colors I never considered that these color the materia there might be information in these colors it's just so scattered for me so I didn't even know there was information really there right so let's go let's go to a game I worked on myself so developing Heather Wars 2 with colorblindness and this isn't this bit

isn't really a success story not for me so I'll be covering some of the Sivir so some of the similar category so we have team colors we have mini-map Mui we had decisions for campaign colors and we had blitz our blitz card mode and some of the AI in that as well so let's talk about team covers so we had teams of we had two teams with three players on each and they wanted to communicate this with color so they wanted to somehow find hues that felt like you would know which team you're on and he would know which units were yours and I I didn't so the the but I heart to talk about the orange yellow and red I think tanks all just kind of looked the same on the battlefield and then the tank in the middle for me it looks a lot more but it looks more like part of their team than it does the either of what blues or

purples the tank of the top on the bottom you can see I think and so I I could sometimes just about tell which tanks were on my team in general I could never tell which ones I was controlling and similarly on the mini-map there was so much information I've been told it was quite actually there were there were too many colors being too many colors being used and into smaller things like this is this is blown up huge this was a tight this is like a couple of inches on the monitor this is a small piece of UI with so much color information III couldn't tell when points were captured the units on one side just look like they're on the completely different team I have no idea and some of them I can't even really see the dark ones blend into the background and the lighter ones look like a foreground UI element it's very difficult to use all right let's play a game your base is under attack there are two enemy units on that map can you see

them right there there and I should I should stress you in all of these slides where I'm showing you two pictures they're exactly the same to me I needed a lot of help to put this talk together to ensure that when I'm actually showing something the there is a difference but I see two identical images the one labeled deuteron up here that's both of them for me so and the first when I first demoed this talk I did make a mistake on one of the slides I put the same image up there twice and I didn't know because it looked the same what the way yet so these these were colors chosen to indicate the enemy versus my own friendly stuff for the campaign and it didn't even occur to me until late in the project that wait how have we done this because I wasn't really seeing anything happening on the map and it could I just thought we didn't show enemies on the map and it was a long it

took a long time for me to realize this similarly this so this is one of our cards from the Blitz card mode and the three colors the the infantry the COG for wickles wickles vehicles and the aircraft least you'll be showing what is this card good against and this and I I think from what I've talked to people before like this looks like it to me at least this looks like it's neutral against infantry and vehicles and probably bad against aircraft but I think I'm wrong I seem to remember the infantry the chopper is actually very good against infantry but I wouldn't be able to tell and on top of this we had a very complex palette we would cut trying to communicate so much all the time and trying to find information for what kind of weapons were being used I know like in it the intensity of the weaponry and which units were on which side and we know

when we're trying to like our environments were different as well we wanted to bring out honor all the kind of lush hallo worlds and they're all they're all exciting colors but it was so complicated like oh I cut like that red glow underneath the unit's like in that myths I have no idea if I have units there as the red player but I worked in this game why couldn't I solve any of these problems like why can I help pointy and I point all these things out and as a missing link so so these problems are invisible if you don't have any I no problems with your color vision to steal the old programmer phrase it works on my machine but but but but the features are often invisible to me so I like I don't I don't know your feature is there I can't bring it up and a practical example so I was fortunate enough to

work on alien isolation as a senior audio QA and while I was testing it I would come up against these guys but they're working Joe's excellent and but I would get kind of really frustrated when I was testing with them because I would sometimes be hiding from one and then I would stand up and he'd see me and I think I was going to attack and he just says to me good day look I thought I thought you were aggressive and it was really annoying me that there was no way to tell visually if they were aggressive or not but of course I was and I didn't realize this until we were in final thing about a month or two out that the the eyes change color they glow but to me with the color blindness it would be it would be like this for due to her notes and proto notes possibly tried to notes as well they there is no glow at all it isn't just that the as long as the light doesn't arrive in my eyes and so but but I didn't know the feature was there and they didn't know it was broken and so where was the

conversation going to start like there was there was no one's job to bring this up another one in connect Star Wars we had a pod racing mode which uses a racing line with all the color schemes you expect in fours or in Gran Turismo and all these now where they go red in the braking zones I didn't know this at the time and then I got given a test case as a tester there to ensure that these were working to ensure that the line goes red in the braking zones to which my question was wait does it is it supposed to and people around saying yeah it does well is it this isn't this isn't a colorblind friendly feature can we do something about it and the response was well this is how forzar and everybody else does it it is this is what everyone else does and but I had no idea like um until I saw this one test case that this this is why I know well okay it's not the only reason I suck at racing games but it but it's a good excuse right let's let's do something

about this we can solve these problems though like it's yeah first one is an easy one don't just use color for any information you're trying to give this is directly from this is from the web content accessibility guidelines websites have strict guidelines they have to abide by and this is one of them okay so color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information indicating an action prompting a response or distinguishing a visual element the the workout guidelines are quite extensive and that they are built on years of industrial practice and that road is off also paved with lawsuits they are serious but of course weird games are complicated especially this bit which I am ironically distinguishing with color so because our games are there's a whole world there's a whole world we're trying to show different elements within so you can see like um

and the websites don't have to you don't have to be able to tell if you can see a car from something or some or spot something in camouflage but there are things we can do about this too so if you want your game to be readable you can think about palette design there is research done there are resources done sorry there are resources out there for you to be able to create a palette with no colors that are and imperceptible to the colorblind and this is a very good this is a good standard practice like if you if you don't want to have to think too much about it if you can build this into a standard practice to make it and you want a readable game these resources are out there and they are really good all these slides will be available on the vault afterwards but take as many pictures as you like but of course this doesn't cover everything because as I said we reinvent our games all the time and we reinvent our problems all the time it's an easy one if you have two things and

only you can't have them get mixed up blue and orange every time I know portal excellent example and even in the early days of Halo red versus blue and they like red and orange up pretty close but these they will not go wrong not for the not for the three types of colorblindness for for a chroma tops here I don't think it covers that unless you had unless you looked at the brightness but there's there's further you can go into this like because the games are all different so what a what's your game like well how are you using color and what do you think what is a color feature that is you never thought was a color feature like so in your in your puzzles I can you don't realize that you the colors distinguish different elements like in maps the infamous red X of the sea of Thebes map right there it I know there are x marks the spot for the treasure I can't see the X they have actually fixed that now they they allow high contrast mode in the map

thank you rare also all of your UI information so so like here's FTL with a huge complex array of and a different hues and things like that so think about how you are using this and of course your team color it's really obvious are your items different so I think these are the red the resident evil herbs like the red green and blue and when the staff a really good but I want to use a really good plant on like whenever anyone a tiny bit of health I don't want to waste the resource I want to be able to make the decision and unlights like I said on am in light in the real world lights are difficult in games lights are difficult because there's a huge amount it's just brightness and they start to all become bright white lights I was trying to go the wrong way down these trading lanes in freelancer again in a game in a game and I got me killed by pirates so many times and and text text as well alright this this is an example where it's okay largely

because the orientation is the same like the orientation is part of the language as well so you generally would never get the Paragon lines in Mass Effect at the bottom light in blue and you wouldn't get the rebel ones in other renegade ones in red up at the top so this is a decent example but it's also as you're figuring out which of these are your features is your palette just going to wipe them all out you need to see everything in context but um some of us work on big teams some of us have a lot of deadlines to get through people are stressed people on a you don't have time for everyone to be thinking about color blindness all the time so you can do some of that work up ahead so if you need certain pieces of information communicated within your games through color then give your give your artists a preset so figure out what they are like this is this is the example I came up with but we'll see a real game we'll see a real world example in a game later where this is exactly what they did and

you can give these to your designers you can allow them to just say right I know your designers and artists just have to like right tag this as enemy tag this as friendly just in script or if you have faction colors then just say right map this to I know the colorful faction a make it a preset so they don't have to they don't have to spend time bouncing the color itself and you can use the color safe palettes to inform all of this so make sure they're clear but of course always test them in context ideally with colorblind people like so there are proper if your company's large they were probably some I think pretty much everyone knew the everyone here raised their hand and said they know someone with colorblindness exactly I like and ask them or ask me like um everyone everyone wants this to work and so we're all happy to talk about it and also like this allows for your artists and diners to be safe in you know be safe in creating their game and knowing they don't have to worry about this

aspect from and as much as they have to like em if you're leading accessibility on praten your project and it you can you can do a lot of the worrying for them and they can just focus on the design this is what you want to enable and you can systematically manage it so like so if you are if you use a test it and you see that there is a problem in one of these presets or in one of the modes then you can you should you can change this as a category it make things easy for yourself to manage these deliveries and they're also of course lots and lots of colorblind simulated tools there are more there are more and more every time I give this talk I've heard about another one so just some examples for you so color Oracle is a free one unity has a package unreal has a preview package Photoshop has a simulator there is a real-time one called sim daltonism Chrome has plugins and I have been using this to create this presentation so this co bliss calendar simulator you just and

it's browser-based you drag an image into it and you can you can just click through the different simulator types and see how is it how do colorblind people see it and another key part of this is like I mentioned before who starts the conversation and you see it has to be you because people that can't see the features can't talk about them so you have to reach out and I'm so glad to say this is already happening at my company since I started huffing on about all of this people come to me people come to me and say hey I'm working on this feature can you see this I'm making this puzzle can you see this I'm getting it from both the teams in creative it's assembly and it's awesome and this is how this is how it should be and and it's it's just a matter of Education which is great and right so yeah keep reaching out to the people you know let's see how some of these solutions work in games so you I think came out last year so this is clearly a color

game which is gonna have a lot of trouble for someone like myself because it's all about matching colors and changing and different colors of environmental things but um but but they knew they thought about it and they're they're colorblind mode would simply give everything symbols I give everything something that people can definitely match and the game isn't they came isn't too fast-paced you can take your time to observe these symbols even though right they can be a bit small you have the time and it enables me to play the game this isn't a game where I have any trouble at all left 4 dead so never dead and it has some complex color information going on so I know there are apparently there's apparently an enemy on top of a friendly there for me but they just they just look like a lump of enemy I don't even really know they look the same but I never had any problem with left 4 dead because it launched where the colorblind mode so for example there were three colors on display here and I can see them all this is what the colorblind

mode looks like so the enemy is I can see the enemy is about to drop onto a friendly I can see there is not at least one more friendly on the floor and I can see there was a fully healthy friendly on the right-hand side like I can see everything you can see when this works and it's fantastic so fathom light if DL so they had so much UI information going on like different statuses and then the rooms would change color to show that they were running out of oxygen and stuff and it was like oh like but I but no no I never had a problem because they thought about it too so with the colorblind mode they over it overhauled all the depths of him from depths of color in information and all of the all of the oxygen there was a cross hatch when a room was out of oxygen like is it was night and day even for me to see that to get the information I needed to play the game and get my dudes out of that room so I'm quite pleased to say we've done some of

this work in total war Warhammer as well in total world war hammer 2 is actually the first time we brought in our colorblind modes at Creative Assembly I'm so pleased to see this is happening it's just a start to show you what they do so total war is complicated we have complicated battlefield there is so much information there are so many things going on but the key part is who is who are my friends and who are my enemies and normally I have no idea but erm but I do now like and they the colors may - an art directors eye they might not be ultimately pleasing but they don't have to care they play they can play the normal mode I can play this one everybody wins I have to I have the option to make the game playable for me and that is what I need similarly text and the this is actually the slide I got wrong that one time because I'd put up that image twice so I think this one should be clear this time and so yeah I can't I can't tell so

for example where it says winded and tired those are problems that is where you need action they are in danger but it looks so similar to an eager or high ground flank secure like I can't make decisions using this and using these colors but now I can like they under thing they might not be as intuitive as the colors were used to using like you know we always want to use red for danger and green for good and but I can't like colorblind people just can't process these and so the most important part is give them the information to play with like and like let them play your game now overwatch this was an interesting example so of course as I said before there was a hell of a lot going on like there's a no different and there are different UI categories they need and other characters are busy and

like the colors and a mixed against the background it's difficult you need a lot and it's a fast game you need to be able to make decisions like that but um but they're colorblind modes I tried them out and they weren't quite right so there was still the problem so the characters were a bit easier to distinguish from the backgrounds now but the colors had changed an enemy and friendly had had kind of become the same so I I i still couldn't really know how to shoot and who to shoot and this actually affected who I chose as characters so am are there any Ana mains here that play overwatch yes my people but the reason I picked down it was because it doesn't matter who I shoot because if it's an enemy it hurts them and if it's a friendly it heals them so that's why I picked them and that similarly with IRISA any recently there are many anyway she had a secondary ability which would pull all enemies into an area just to kind of make them easier to like either to pull them off a ledge or pull them out from behind cover

of things I would use it to tell in a group of people which ones my own were my enemies that's that's what that enabled me to do like and it's it's just an accident but it it affected my decisions in playing the game and then there was a streamer called colorblind and she does she has I think protanopia and has a lot of a lot of videos quite passionate videos going into what these colorblind modes are like how there are problem where they're a problem they're really good examples of where it's where it can be difficult to achieve this there's and some very good ones of there's a very passionate video of her trying the in chroma classes as well it's like it's quite heart-wrenching sorry so color selection controls are the most exciting one this is giving me the power to fix the problem so audiosurf you have to match five colors and fast having five colors that are

distinct to a colorblind person is really hard so don't try give me the buttons and I'll figure it out myself and I can make sure it works for me and you don't even know you don't even have to know what I see you don't have to understand my condition to be able to help me and this is perfect even some games would do by most so worms Armageddon like all that time ago I used to play with friends a lot but with my friends I if I'm talking to my friends I can agree with them which colors they were to allow me to play so they could play the dark colors and I could just be I could just be yellow I can see that against all the others same with red alert like so I know they would let me pick the light blue whatever just so just so I could play the game with my friends which is what everyone wants and in fact I called out overwatch earlier they have improved recently they are they are I'm so pleased that they are still working on it like I don't know the names of the people in Blizzard working on accessibility but I'm really thankful for that their Mission

Continues because this is a big change so having I can now set enemy in friendly to be completely different colors so like I've picked their blue in yellow it's almost there if I can choose the group color as well then I can make it all work out but but her because the group color is whether these stuff last time I played still locked to orange I kind of had to have the colors the other way around to what was perfect it was better but it it's almost there and now we come full circle back to battlefield so battlefield brought battlefield brought in a colorblind mode late in about nine months after release of battlefield 3 they saw that they saw the problems that were there and they dealt with it but they have improved over time so this was several months ago in this was in battlefield one actually and for a while they had colorblind modes which I know separated squad team and enemy color and I could choose different ones but they've out there game this is amazing

they don't even have to know what type of colorblindness you are like I get a whole hue graph to choose from any colors and I can and I don't this way I can make them not just be distinct from each other but I can pick colors that stand out from the environment like I can I can stop I can play this game and forget I'm colorblind which is the point which is exactly what I want like and you can even do this without thinking about color at all like so these two games gang beasts and star wall it's like I don't have to know what color my character is I'm a chicken as well after no or in Star Wars like and I could just say what color you sombrero right and that said so this like it's a great part of these kind of games anyway like and I given the players a way to like choose their characters but it is an accessibility feature that you didn't know you put in and it's an excellent and of course it's

also important to make sure people can access the features you've got and so fortnight here there was a whole tab like you go into the options menu and people can see there's an accessibility tab I find a way to make it make people know that there are accessibility features I didn't know although I called out some audiosurf as being really good it was a long time before I actually thought to look or stumbled across it in the options menus I didn't think it would be there and so you have to be better than people's expectations of your game well you have to be clear like I know we support accessibility because we're still people still aren't you people used to assuming they're not and so make us someone dance about it's great PR as well and for tonight's one was particularly interesting because people are actually getting diagnosed omen.oh accidentally through for buying because people don't understand there's a lot of young people playing like them they they it's great they can't even say Triton OPA like I hear them on YouTube videos

trying to talk about this but they can still make it work for them because they just set the settings to work best for what they can see they just and I solved alarm a puzzle for themselves it's perfect but it's something something something funny happened on Monday so at the game accessibility conference Brice Johnson was speaking about the Xbox adaptive game controller which is incredible like and there was a moment where they have audio transcript so for deaf users watching and there was a moment where like he did an impression of someone and like he was saying I'll light on people are we supported the ease and he was doing an impression and so the typist wrote gamer bro voice and it came up on screen and we've and people were laughing about it and other people taking pictures but then some she typed something else and that's when I took a picture she typed the word blushing I knew someone was blushing

this has never happened before like so this is this is this was not an accessibility feature this was not an accessibility aim to help colorblind people and in fact like this is something this is something this is something we should have here like a GDC ideally I want to call that out like I know we can and should be supporting these these talks should be accessible themselves so and I we should be focusing on having deaf support like I know mobility support but a key part is these features affect a lot these features helped a lot of people all at once so this was this is a feature that ideally initially to help deaf people but it also helps people with a struggling attention spans who can look back and then read like if they phase out the I know what someone was saying they can still pick up on it some people take in information better reading and and I got to know when someone was blushing like and this was this is new and we can think about this

like so when you're thinking about colorblind features think further because improving visual clarity helps more than just people like me so I know it helps colorblind people but it also helps people with the chroma top SIA I think it helped people with low vision issues like and people get cataracts like we're all going to be having some of these problems someday probably and then also brain injuries impaired hearing the visual information becomes more and more important and the more like and if you lose your hearing and so making it as clear as possible or giving people the choice of how to manage it is so important and even in cognitive disabilities so and the there so many of their issues are to do with how they receive information and giving them control over the visual input they get can enable I know new players all over again someone else that this helps it's everybody let's go back to fortnight for a moment so

the foot there is a triton opium ode that is used a lot in fortnight but there aren't many there aren't many triton epic players so who's playing this and it's it's everybody like people are looking for the clearest way to play and so there are loads and loads of these videos saying here are the best colorblind setting you can have to make fortnight really easy to see like it makes the dilute shelve it makes the enemy show up and this shows you something this shows that people like people want a clear experience people want a clear and readable experience you get if you give them the choice they like ship the experience you want to do but give them the choice to make it to tune it to themselves alright to make it perfect for them because we don't know it everyone is different but this is you can help you can help so many people and bring on so many new players and like widen these communities so much more if you just think how many people can I help with the solution and work it in think ahead

so let's wrap this up so key steps understand your palette and you're color blind features what does your game do with color and don't just communicate with color either so I think I've read those the wrong way around there are there are preview tools all over the place use them try to understand and like do some of the work in advance to kind of get used to where there might be problems over time it will start to become intuitive use color preset systems if that works to people and I shuffled some of these last night just to fit more in but ideally find the best solutions for your game and make some wide-reaching think about how many people you can deal with I know with a single feature and also but also test it so and it's there are consultants out there you know people like and you may have friends and relatives and they they will love to see

this working it's really exciting and and also make sure people can find these options and of course your community ask them for feedback like um if you ask them here people having accessibility options people will say something and they will be so thrilled that you care because they don't know it unless you say something and there's I also I thought I want to talk about how important this is for a moment so it doesn't it doesn't always feel like it colorblindness is just frustration in life most of the time but when I get to when I get to a situation in a game where I love video games and so many so do some of the other color blind players they love them and then if you just hit a wall because of something you can't change it's heartbreaking and so this is but here's the thing like when like when I say like if someone is showing that they're trying so I don't care if the color blend modes don't quite work I can't really care if they're broken someone is trying to help me right they're trying to solve a problem for me that they can't even see they're doing

this for me and it's so important so I really mean this when I say thank you so we have have five minutes for questions so please come up to the mics if you'd like to ask anything or find me afterwards like I'll just be outside right do we have any and also if you're going to take one picture today take that one right hello hi one question for you do you prefer the bespoke individual you I adjust monsford color or doing whole screen colorblindness color correction so do I prefer UI controls over changing the whole screen color so I think I think I prefer just changing the UI colors because changing the whole screen so think of it this way I'm glad I still

have this so you see the strip where it says deuteron Opia that's my world like I don't need I don't need my world changing I just wanted I just want to know what the signs say so I think I would say I prefer just give control over the UI I don't need the entire screen to change color it's some people do that because they think that this will make it work and like this will make it readable and sometimes it does but it there is no guarantee that it does so it's whatever solves the problem again like the best solution for your game but I I think I prefer the UI hello I was wondering if you have any suggestions you talk about having color information and supporting it with other information is there any best practice on developing a shape language that's fast to identify different things like in puzzle games or UI elements so is there a standard on developing shape languages for these I would say no because you're the things you need to

communicate with that shape language they change for every single game so a lot of these kind of develop culturally so like we have the play button for go we have the fast-forwards for go for words and those kind of built up over time but in short I if you're not sure if your shape language works for people that can't see the colors then ask them like I know just I know so bringing some bringing some people that can and bringing some people that can tell you exactly how they experience your game and that should that should be the best way so if you're not sure ask like so I was working on a game with my team and I was demoing it to a bunch of people who worked in our organization and I started to realize from people playtesting that they didn't understand when certain things were happening in the game because there were most it was mostly color information and there was subtle movement on the screen but if you blinked you basically would miss that

and not know it was happening and so I try to bring that to one of the producers who is in charge of prioritizing what features we would add to the game and something a struggle that I encountered is that sometimes they think that a bunch of other features are a lot more important than accessibility and I wonder if you have any tips for communicating the importance of accessibility early on as opposed to something that you tack on later once other quote priority things are accomplished first I'm really glad you asked this question because I struggle with this as well so so to summarize the question being how do you convince other people of the importance of accessibility over the priority of other features so I start with this a creative assembly like there is lots of important work to do and some of the things that I've found that of work is one going on about it because I talk to people about all time and other people

it steadily builds interest in a cultural way but also when you're going to when you're trying to convince someone to do something especially if we're trying to convince a producer to do something don't make finally make sure you arrive with a solution so something we can do because they if you can give them a solution that fits within the costs of their project and fits within the timeframe to that project and that they they lose that first they lose the reason to need you know like and then it becomes then it becomes something you can think about and discuss and also even like a even if the feature comes late like even if I know because in a way you like if this feature comes a little after release I've seen it happen in games and where I know their game was released and then accessibility features come in later better late than never it's still in the right direction and also if it's developed then for if you're doing sequels or DLC you've got it now and so that's what I'd advise is a educate as many people as you can

about the reality and I do they give people actionable solutions to help them help them help because most people want to they just don't know what to do thank you thanks I think we're there thank you so much for coming [Applause]