Color blind gamer (2008)
blahg.res0l.net
blahg.res0l.net
As I've aged I start to notice it everywhere though -- video games, greeting cards (hello Christmas colors), and websites alike. Just yesterday, in fact, I was reminded when I checked the reservation status for my ZipCar -- it looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/OkC2dG0.png.
I decided to tweet them and give them a suggestion of how to fix it (my idea: http://i.imgur.com/nNVUXLO.png), but in general it surprises me how infrequently designers/developers will think about a large portion of the population (8-10% of males) when they sometimes will spend days making sure IE8 or other browsers with increasingly smaller marketshare look great.
What's amazing is how many interfaces in real life still fails at a level where even a non-color-blind person like me can see it on a daily basis.
Not only that, but it also had an "empathy filter" that would adjust the colors so people with normal color vision could see what it looked like to people with various forms of color blindness.
I think that's an excellent accessibility feature, which should be built into the operating system or video driver, so you can apply it to all games and applications.
Not only are the filters to adjust the colors for color blind people useful, but also the empathy filters are useful for developers and designers who want to test their applications and designs to make sure they're usable by color blind people.
For example, you might want to use a different color mapping for Flower than for Doom.
This seems like something Apple should do, since they're so good at accessibility, and they used to have a very colorful logo, but something happened to it over the years.
I think we are talking about two - both good - ideas. I was thinking a "show people with working vision what stuff looks like to the colour deficient" - e.g. toggled by the press of a button. Sounds like you're thinking of a "colour management thing to help colour blind people actively change their experience". That too could be awesome, although one down side is possibly: for all that my vision is deficient, it's normal now to me, and any permanent screen filter would be very strange to work with.
As far as games go, the best mechanism seems one which requires no colour vision at all: i.e. if you can still play it in black and white (TV / monitor settings), then it's 100% friendly to the colour blind. Things like textures, symbols, shapes, contrast, and blinking can all be useful when done judiciously.
Of course - colour blindness is not the same as no-colour-perception. Explaining to friends and family that I don't see black and white has been a theme for me for 30+ years now :-)
I recently worked with the developer of 2x0ng [0] to create a color blind mode for his fun game. It started with solid blocks of color [1] and ended up with patterned blocks of color [2] that resulted in the game being playable by color blind individuals.
[0] - http://blocky.io/2x0ng.html
[1] - http://media.desura.com/cache/images/games/1/22/21729/thumb_...
[2] - http://imgur.com/a/098zC
Example: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/TopTenWik...
Hard for me to distinguish en/de/pl and ja/it and nl/pt.
Anyway, being a robot, and old-school ASCII, retro-green colours are to be expected. So I remarked on his TIGsource devlog that I was colourblind. Then the Kyzrati, the sole developer, does this:
http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/04/accommodating-colo...
And that is why indy-developers are awesome.
For example, in Left 4 Dead, why not just use the white crosshair with black background all the time?
Having an additional mode to a game is another thing to test, and in this case I don't see the benefit of keeping it separate.
I'm inclined to agree about the specific example of the L4D crosshairs, though.