Colour-blindness – or colour vision deficiency – is a serious affliction for many gamers, as it locks out a great many games to those who have trouble differentiating between certain colours. It’s especially a problem for games that heavily rely on user interfaces that, even to those with regular sight, look like a rainbow just vomited on screen. After over 10 years, World of Warcraft is finally adding in a few toggles to make the game better for the colour vision deficient.
According to Battle.net, Blizzard will soon be implementing three sets of colour filters designed to make the game look better to those suffering from the varying forms of protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia.
“Each set of colour adjustments is available via a handy dropdown selector, and each comes with a ‘strength’ slider. The farther to the right you set the slider, the more the game removes potentially problematic wavelengths of colour for each type,” Blizzard said.
Information that would otherwise be colour-dependent, will now be viewable through tooltips.
“For example, when you move your mouse cursor over a piece of rare gear and then a piece of epic gear, the game colours the names of the items blue and then purple, respectively. With ‘UI Colourblind Mode’ enabled, the game will add the words ‘Rare’ and ‘Epic’ to the tooltips for those items,” Blizzard said.
“For players who find it difficult to discern between friendly, neutral, or hostile targets, additional indication text in the tooltip will now appear when you move your mouse cursor over other characters.”
That’s nice, progressive stuff from Blizzard – and it’ll make the game a lot friendlier to the colour-blind. And as far as accessibility goes, it’s probably the easiest to implement. There’s really very little excuse these days; even Call of Duty comes with options for the colourblind, and support was patched into Borderlands 2. If you don’t think it’s such a big problem, here’s a look at how it affects gamers.
Last Updated: February 17, 2015
Viking Of Science
February 17, 2015 at 12:07
http://youtu.be/G_f8ayQQx4I
Exalted Overlord Geoffrey Tim
February 17, 2015 at 12:11
Check the alt-text. 🙂
Viking Of Science
February 17, 2015 at 12:15
what else would’ve reminded me of Mallrats… 😛
RinceThis
February 17, 2015 at 12:10
Nice to see this. But hasn’t WoW been out forever?
RinceThis
February 17, 2015 at 12:10
Nice to see this. But hasn’t WoW been out forever?
Captain JJ the crafter
February 17, 2015 at 12:50
I just know OVG just loves World of Warcraft, so this must make him very happy ;P
Hammersteyn
February 17, 2015 at 12:11
I thought it was a banana and a slice of pizza.
Admiral Chief
February 17, 2015 at 12:54
JIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM
Hammersteyn
February 17, 2015 at 12:56
XD
Tosh "Did he just say that?"
February 17, 2015 at 12:31
Fairly progressive. First they let the mentally challenged play their game by dumbing it down, now they’re letting the colourblind play. How thoughtful of them!!!
Ross Woofels Mason
February 17, 2015 at 12:32
When I used to work in IT the one guy was colour blind. One of the switches went down in the server room and he was getting angry at because because to him all the switches looked up and no-one could figure out what the hell was going on till some one else went in there and was like Wtf! Then he told us he was colour blind and he did not work with the switches again lol.
It has to suck, glad to see people are taking something like this into account these days.
umfezo45
February 17, 2015 at 13:32
Screw you Geoff! I can’t see the header. This is why I’m not a pilot right now while the rest of my family is…
Exalted Overlord Geoffrey Tim
February 17, 2015 at 13:56
🙁
Brady miaau
February 17, 2015 at 15:10
Yeah, my dad wanted to be a pilot in the airforce, but failed the colour criteria. Funny thing, in 2nd world war they loved the colour blind because they could spot the camo-nets more easily.
Spathi
February 17, 2015 at 13:42
…
Brady miaau
February 17, 2015 at 15:09
From my own experience, certain games are not playable by the colour blind. Civ 2 had colour blind help as an option, where the owner name went under the objects. Without it I could not have played that game.
Some puzzles in games rely on colours, so I have to call the wife over to get them right. I simply cannot do them.
This is a good thing. Well done.
xcovick
February 18, 2015 at 05:08
This is some serious stuff for other players with that eye problems. Its good that Bliz came to think of it cause they take care of there players.