Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
A new patch will help color-blind players of the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft navigate through the game’s menus and options by creating a more accessible interface system.
In a statement posted online Monday by the game’s developer, Blizzard, the company announced that patch 6.1 would allow users to enable both text and color enhancements to help overcome their visual issues. The ‘Enable UI Colorblind Mode,’ which the company said has been located in the ‘Help’ section, will now be found in the “Accessibility” interface configuration area.
“These text enhancements add certain words and phrases to the tooltips throughout the game – tooltips that, by default, use different colors to indicate useful information about objects, NPCs, and other players,” they explained. “The game will now have three sets of colorblind filters to choose from: protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia.”
Typically, when players move their mouse icon over a piece of rare equipment, then a piece of epic gear, the game colors the names of the items blue and purple, respectively. With the new UI, however, the game will also add the words ‘rare’ and ‘epic’ to the tooltips for those items. Text will also help users differentiate between friendly, neutral, or hostile targets.
“These are designed to assist players who have one of the three types of dichromacy, and should be useful to those who have one of the three kinds of anomalous trichromacy: protanomaly, deuteranomaly, and tritanomaly,” Blizzard said. “Each set of color 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 color for each type,” the company added. Patch 6.1 was reportedly in the testing stage as of Tuesday, and should be released to all players in the near future.
Could be better
According to BBC News, however, some experts aren’t convinced that the changes will be all that helpful to the one in 12 men and one in 200 women who suffer from color-blindness.
Ian Hamilton, an accessibility expert who developed an app to make the London Underground easier to navigate for those who are color-blind, said that the changes were not perfect.
“I don’t want to knock them. They have gone to the effort of doing something about it, but they are choosing the wrong colors to replace the traditional ones,” he told the British media outlet, adding that the system could easily be fixed.
An increasing number of video game developers have taken steps to make their products more accessible to the color-blind in recent years, Hamilton added, holding up King’s popular mobile match-three puzzle game Candy Crush Saga as one example.
“Candy Crush is a perfect example of how you can design shape as well as color. Although this is the case for most of the game, it isn’t for the later levels when they introduce bombs and eggs. At that stage, they are losing people,” he said.
“Games generally do cause a lot of problems, and there are a lot of people in the gaming community putting pressure on the gaming firms to bring in color-blind friendly modes,” added Kathryn Albany-Ward, founder of the UK organization Colour Blind Awareness.
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