Thanks for providing your unique experience... though things like this are always difficult for me since it sounds like your disabilities are profound and unusual (though you didn't say what they actually are), and it's tricky to accommodate such people. For one thing, I can't know what it's like to see the world as you do (much of what you described is so massively different to my experience of reality!), so it's hard to test anything, but also people with conditions such as these are such a tiny minority that it's just not practical to devote time and resources to adding extensive accommodations. And I hate that since I wish I could just make my stuff available for everyone to enjoy!
I really have no idea what I could do with Atonal Dreams, for example, since you seem to have difficulties with the general graphics and music. Are there basic accessibility settings that other games include that would make things more tolerable for you (and which wouldn't require me to spend weeks adding them)? You mentioned having difficulties with 3D in general though, so it might not be as easy as, say, some colour filter or volume slider...
How many other games are you able to play without distress? Do you have issues with the majority of them, or do most have settings you can adjust to make them tolerable?
0
LightAcolyte22~3Y
Wow, thank you for your reply Tobias!
I am able to play many games (have completed/played all the way through hundreds, but only about 70-80 3D games). Enjoying them is another matter (probably about two hundred have been enjoyable, the other hundred plus games I only completed because I needed to finish a review of them, or really wanted to see how a later game mechanic worked out in practice so I slogged through it).
Designing for accessibility isn't too difficult when you know how (obviously when I'm programming in C/lua/python/java it's on my mind), but it certainly does require some awareness although honestly not too much planning usually!
I have visual, auditory, and "physical" disabilities that I need to account for and adapt whenever I do something that requires sight, hearing, or two hands. Since I have lived every day for many years with a lot of pain and sensory difficulty, choosing to play a video game is not much different a choice for me from the pain of reading in a mode other than Braille, the pain of breathing or speaking, or the pain and difficulty of eating. One still has to live life, and that doing so means you will incur more pain is just a cost to pay in order to keep living is just a reality many of us have to accept to move forward.
I encourage you to look at accessibility as about being more user-friendly so people can enjoy more comfortable, longer play sessions than they otherwise might with adverse conditions. While I admit a smaller percentage of "gamers" may be impacted by everything I mentioned, the number of people who have difficulty playing games due to physical, visual or auditory complications is a lot larger than the number of people with "disability" medically or legally recognized in those areas. If I think about how many times people have complained about controllers that "they can never get used to," games "you just can't play without a keyboard," graphics that "make their eyes bleed," and sounds that "they can't feel their spine for hours afterward:" these are issues that for some are an unpleasant inconvenience but with disabilities can completely obstruct play.
For example, some studies have shown even 2/3 of the general population experience motion sickness playing 3D games ([LINK] Keeping field of view perspective at 80 to 85 deg. can help with that, but the values depend on the graphics and rendering. This is much larger than, for example, the number of persons with photosensitive epilepsy who can have seizures from flashy game effects (i.e.: 0.06% of the population is far less than 67% of the population). While you might only hear from a minority of people complaining about something like text size restrictions in a game like StarCraft II, usually a lot more people are having difficulty (or even unimpaired gamers just don't like having to "strain") than anyone who takes time to articulate the problem in detail. If you add up the panned reviews from it, the people trying to mod it, the people getting banned for changing Blizzard's play experience by altering the font and the people who just returned/asked for refund you start to get the broader picture of what exposure it has. So, some may be squeaky wheels, but many more are just trying to "fix" the problem on their own replacing fonts and the like from some dude's advice on a message board. Even more won't want to bother or mess with it and just move on to a game they can play.
While it's not something regularly considered by game designers, if you look at how many PC games just have font replacement mods and how many downloads those get versus other mods, you can get a good feel for how many people are really experiencing visual difficulty. Recently NFB and NAD did several studies here in the U.S. on it. I have noted up to around 75% of download share on Nexus for some games just in trying to get more legible fonts! This is an issue that goes from Neverwinter Nights to Call of Duty, not one game or company.
Visibility issues also affects workplace productivity for instance because people have less eye strain and more productivity when they use off-white backgrounds, such as found in several studies by Microsoft on Excel. So many issues like uncomfortable noises or font style and background colors can also improve work and user experiences beyond just persons with disability, and I think that's an important thing to remember about how quality of life improvements can extend beyond just game mechanics.
However, mostly, people with disability in my experience really don't want to have to have people doing special things for them. If they want a change, it should make a large number of people happier to have the option for whatever the convenience is to them as the need is for accommodating the disability. Like because I mostly use only one hand well, I just remap keys to whatever I need them to be to play PC games. Would it be nice if you had keys all on one side of a keyboard for me? Sure. However, I don't see any reason for you to program for those when I can easily work around that and deal with them at the operating system level. Furthermore, I think it's impractical for you as a game designer to try to specifically program for these things, because it affects cross-platform compatibility and can interfere with how the operating system and other programs try to accommodate accessibility.
So, off the top of my head, here's some things that can be done (I'm not saying do everything):
1. Allow for text to be large, "size" 18-22 as rendered (like typical PowerPoint text size advice) should be the standard.
2. Allow for fonts and backgrounds to be customized (consoles as far back as the NES did this, sometimes calling it "style" or "flavor"), always including at minimum an option with dark background and light text.
3. Allow for text to appear in one place on screen whenever possible (two places if you want exchanges to be right-left or top-down). For instance, in MARDEK you included a log where you could revisit what was said in the same format and location at any time. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that. It could be to increase enjoyment possibly, but need and want are on totally different wavelengths and you could chase what people want all year to no effect.
4. Allow for a fixed camera or overhead view option. Yes, it may not showcase your beautifully detailed design work as much, and if you use camera-switching then it may not be as smooth as following the animation; but, it will be functional.
5. Allow for an option to at least limit the brightness of effects to a more limited range. Yes, maybe this will affect hue and color reproduction when enabled, but if it means the difference between playable and not playable it will matter to those users. This is unfortunately not just something that can be compensated for outside-of-game if the differences are very large in contrast between light and dark such that half the game isn't visible to dim sufficiently the brightest effects.
6. Allow for sound to be produced only within the standardized range of human hearing and comfort level, avoiding sounds that are too high or low in pitch except to be used sparingly with intent in non-repeatable scenes where the sound will be used only for specifically poignant effect.
7. Allow for an option to limit reverberation and echo if using any effects that enhance reverb or echo and to limit "enhancement" of sound to "better than stereo" options like 5.1 Dolby Digital discrete output.
8. Ensure all on-screen options CAN be selected from the keyboard, even if it's faster to do so by mouse. For instance in MARDEK, some screens are basically only mouse-enabled; however, you CAN navigate them by tabbing so they are still accessible even if not designed optimally for that.
For instance, if you have battles fought on a beach, and you want light-colored sand: that's fine, that's your game design vision! You don't need only black sand beaches in your world for accessibility, but just consider when you have text and graphics rendered on this that if the focus is on these backgrounds the same as a green grass background, then it will be as painful as looking at a sunny beach in real life is for many people. You instinctively learn not to look at the sand in real life (pain is a good motivator, so you focus on the horizon or darker water or the nearby flora), but you don't have this option really in the game because the field of view is what's on the screen. I also think it's unrealistic to re-work your music; you should not have to change how you want the game to sound! You could instead just allow people to turn off sound effects, music, etc. more selectively. Also, if you have simpler MIDI tracks or something that you used in development, enabling these as an option for music would improve satisfaction for listeners who struggle with more complicated tracks.
I hope this helps, but I can assist with coding of how these options can be easily implemented without specifically re-working graphics or sound too or providing open source examples in other games for you to consider; however, certain post-processing may impact your game undesirably, and that's where it gets messy if you try to be fancy. Like compensating for beach scenes with allowing solid background GUI menus instead of transparent is fairly simple, but making totally different art and special graphics for the non-transparent menu is a monumental undertaking really. I do not want to distract or detract from your work because you've already achieved accessible games before (MARDEK CH.1/2/3), and that's more than most "indies" do! (smile)
I really have no idea what I could do with Atonal Dreams, for example, since you seem to have difficulties with the general graphics and music. Are there basic accessibility settings that other games include that would make things more tolerable for you (and which wouldn't require me to spend weeks adding them)? You mentioned having difficulties with 3D in general though, so it might not be as easy as, say, some colour filter or volume slider...
How many other games are you able to play without distress? Do you have issues with the majority of them, or do most have settings you can adjust to make them tolerable?
I am able to play many games (have completed/played all the way through hundreds, but only about 70-80 3D games). Enjoying them is another matter (probably about two hundred have been enjoyable, the other hundred plus games I only completed because I needed to finish a review of them, or really wanted to see how a later game mechanic worked out in practice so I slogged through it).
Designing for accessibility isn't too difficult when you know how (obviously when I'm programming in C/lua/python/java it's on my mind), but it certainly does require some awareness although honestly not too much planning usually!
I have visual, auditory, and "physical" disabilities that I need to account for and adapt whenever I do something that requires sight, hearing, or two hands. Since I have lived every day for many years with a lot of pain and sensory difficulty, choosing to play a video game is not much different a choice for me from the pain of reading in a mode other than Braille, the pain of breathing or speaking, or the pain and difficulty of eating. One still has to live life, and that doing so means you will incur more pain is just a cost to pay in order to keep living is just a reality many of us have to accept to move forward.
I encourage you to look at accessibility as about being more user-friendly so people can enjoy more comfortable, longer play sessions than they otherwise might with adverse conditions. While I admit a smaller percentage of "gamers" may be impacted by everything I mentioned, the number of people who have difficulty playing games due to physical, visual or auditory complications is a lot larger than the number of people with "disability" medically or legally recognized in those areas. If I think about how many times people have complained about controllers that "they can never get used to," games "you just can't play without a keyboard," graphics that "make their eyes bleed," and sounds that "they can't feel their spine for hours afterward:" these are issues that for some are an unpleasant inconvenience but with disabilities can completely obstruct play.
For example, some studies have shown even 2/3 of the general population experience motion sickness playing 3D games ([LINK] Keeping field of view perspective at 80 to 85 deg. can help with that, but the values depend on the graphics and rendering. This is much larger than, for example, the number of persons with photosensitive epilepsy who can have seizures from flashy game effects (i.e.: 0.06% of the population is far less than 67% of the population). While you might only hear from a minority of people complaining about something like text size restrictions in a game like StarCraft II, usually a lot more people are having difficulty (or even unimpaired gamers just don't like having to "strain") than anyone who takes time to articulate the problem in detail. If you add up the panned reviews from it, the people trying to mod it, the people getting banned for changing Blizzard's play experience by altering the font and the people who just returned/asked for refund you start to get the broader picture of what exposure it has. So, some may be squeaky wheels, but many more are just trying to "fix" the problem on their own replacing fonts and the like from some dude's advice on a message board. Even more won't want to bother or mess with it and just move on to a game they can play.
While it's not something regularly considered by game designers, if you look at how many PC games just have font replacement mods and how many downloads those get versus other mods, you can get a good feel for how many people are really experiencing visual difficulty. Recently NFB and NAD did several studies here in the U.S. on it. I have noted up to around 75% of download share on Nexus for some games just in trying to get more legible fonts! This is an issue that goes from Neverwinter Nights to Call of Duty, not one game or company.
Visibility issues also affects workplace productivity for instance because people have less eye strain and more productivity when they use off-white backgrounds, such as found in several studies by Microsoft on Excel. So many issues like uncomfortable noises or font style and background colors can also improve work and user experiences beyond just persons with disability, and I think that's an important thing to remember about how quality of life improvements can extend beyond just game mechanics.
However, mostly, people with disability in my experience really don't want to have to have people doing special things for them. If they want a change, it should make a large number of people happier to have the option for whatever the convenience is to them as the need is for accommodating the disability. Like because I mostly use only one hand well, I just remap keys to whatever I need them to be to play PC games. Would it be nice if you had keys all on one side of a keyboard for me? Sure. However, I don't see any reason for you to program for those when I can easily work around that and deal with them at the operating system level. Furthermore, I think it's impractical for you as a game designer to try to specifically program for these things, because it affects cross-platform compatibility and can interfere with how the operating system and other programs try to accommodate accessibility.
So, off the top of my head, here's some things that can be done (I'm not saying do everything):
1. Allow for text to be large, "size" 18-22 as rendered (like typical PowerPoint text size advice) should be the standard.
2. Allow for fonts and backgrounds to be customized (consoles as far back as the NES did this, sometimes calling it "style" or "flavor"), always including at minimum an option with dark background and light text.
3. Allow for text to appear in one place on screen whenever possible (two places if you want exchanges to be right-left or top-down). For instance, in MARDEK you included a log where you could revisit what was said in the same format and location at any time. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that. It could be to increase enjoyment possibly, but need and want are on totally different wavelengths and you could chase what people want all year to no effect.
4. Allow for a fixed camera or overhead view option. Yes, it may not showcase your beautifully detailed design work as much, and if you use camera-switching then it may not be as smooth as following the animation; but, it will be functional.
5. Allow for an option to at least limit the brightness of effects to a more limited range. Yes, maybe this will affect hue and color reproduction when enabled, but if it means the difference between playable and not playable it will matter to those users. This is unfortunately not just something that can be compensated for outside-of-game if the differences are very large in contrast between light and dark such that half the game isn't visible to dim sufficiently the brightest effects.
6. Allow for sound to be produced only within the standardized range of human hearing and comfort level, avoiding sounds that are too high or low in pitch except to be used sparingly with intent in non-repeatable scenes where the sound will be used only for specifically poignant effect.
7. Allow for an option to limit reverberation and echo if using any effects that enhance reverb or echo and to limit "enhancement" of sound to "better than stereo" options like 5.1 Dolby Digital discrete output.
8. Ensure all on-screen options CAN be selected from the keyboard, even if it's faster to do so by mouse. For instance in MARDEK, some screens are basically only mouse-enabled; however, you CAN navigate them by tabbing so they are still accessible even if not designed optimally for that.
For instance, if you have battles fought on a beach, and you want light-colored sand: that's fine, that's your game design vision! You don't need only black sand beaches in your world for accessibility, but just consider when you have text and graphics rendered on this that if the focus is on these backgrounds the same as a green grass background, then it will be as painful as looking at a sunny beach in real life is for many people. You instinctively learn not to look at the sand in real life (pain is a good motivator, so you focus on the horizon or darker water or the nearby flora), but you don't have this option really in the game because the field of view is what's on the screen. I also think it's unrealistic to re-work your music; you should not have to change how you want the game to sound! You could instead just allow people to turn off sound effects, music, etc. more selectively. Also, if you have simpler MIDI tracks or something that you used in development, enabling these as an option for music would improve satisfaction for listeners who struggle with more complicated tracks.
I hope this helps, but I can assist with coding of how these options can be easily implemented without specifically re-working graphics or sound too or providing open source examples in other games for you to consider; however, certain post-processing may impact your game undesirably, and that's where it gets messy if you try to be fancy. Like compensating for beach scenes with allowing solid background GUI menus instead of transparent is fairly simple, but making totally different art and special graphics for the non-transparent menu is a monumental undertaking really. I do not want to distract or detract from your work because you've already achieved accessible games before (MARDEK CH.1/2/3), and that's more than most "indies" do! (smile)