Gaming With Disabilities / Accessibility

[vurrsys]

Thought I'd make this thread just to have a discussion on being someone who loves games, but has difficulty playing them due to disability. No gatekeeping here, we all deserve room to talk about our experiences. I figure this is also a good place to talk about accessibility in video games!

Quite recently, I developed photosensitive epilepsy, and I've been unable to look at flashing lights or else I risk my body freezing up. This has caused multiple problems with the things I used to love to do, but especially gaming. So many games have flashy effects with no option to turn them off, to the point where I question if gamedevs care about epileptics at all. There's also no website like doesthedogdie for video games that I know of, so every old game I start up poses a risk. It's felt really isolating, something I knew physically disabled folks felt but didn't quite know personally until recently. I try to play games still, though. I have to skip out on a lot of games I would've loved pre-epilepsy, but I can't change how my brain processes light

Every time a game has a flashing toggle, I feel super thankful. I hope devs who add accessibility settings know how much it means to disabled folks, when so often we are only acknowledged to be told that a game is not accessible and given 0 solutions

[StarlightNecromancer]

I'm honestly really glad that a lot of PC games are starting to have to really deeply consider controller support, because for me that is very much an accessibility issue. I have damage in my left hand due to my work, I still can't hold a pen for very long (Which sucks when you were getting into calligraphy the year before you got the job that ruined your dominant hand) and controller support is frankly one of the only ways I can play some of the high octane games that I love. And even with some, like Ultrakill, I have to bump the aim assist on and only play for short bursts.

World of Warcraft, I feel, has a very large looming question of accessibility come Midnight. The reason I feel this way is because the team is going on a slaughter of gameplay informative addons and will be entirely re-designing dungeon and raid encounters to make up for their loss. Now I want to stress that I feel like this is a good thing. There's no shortage of memes about the difference between raiding in Classic vs raiding in Retail.

Where does the accessibility come in? Addons that are effectively fancy mouse-over-click addons, like the ones commonly used for healers (a role which is my main). Without Clique, Healbot, VuhDoh, or any number of healing addons healing might actually become out of the question for me and players like me who have some kind of issue with our hands that would otherwise make it at best extremely difficult to do even Normal, let alone Heroic or Mythic, raiding. However, while we know that WeakAura, Deadly Boss Mobs, and similar addons are getting the chop we don't know what the status of healing addons is. Especially as the (new) base UI for mouse-over-healing does not provide enough functionality to be able to replace any of them. Especially for some classpecs like Preservation Evoker or even Mistweaver Monk — you can't even apply Soothing Mist using the base UI mouse-over-healing you have to use an addon, which is a pretty big deal considering its your bread and butter healing spell!

Recently they added an option to make your rotation for damage one button, so you just tab-target what you want and let the one button do the work. This is fine, very good for casual play but I feel like we can do better. And I feel like part of the answer is to look at what FFXIV is doing. I'm able to do raids and extremes in FFXIV because of the native controller support, and the fact that the game is designed around the fact that there's people playing on consoles; so they can't just pretend everyone's on mouse and keyboard.

There's an addon in WoW that makes use of its native controller support and arranges the UI in such a way that it mirrors the FFXIV controller UI setup, as well as make macros for accessing abilities, spells, whatever you have on your hotbars. Its highly recommended to have other UI addons (these ones will likely be safe as they do not affect combat and are purely for RP) that are for immersion when questing to make this all easier to interface with while you're controller gaming.

If Blizzard was smart, they'd fold all of this in and make it an option in Midnight. Controller support would be a massive boon to accessibility on top of them re-thinking how they're gonna do encounter design in the coming years.

[Enbyeon]

I'm trying to be kinder to my wrist and after getting into ARPGs and dealing with a lot of wrist pain from clicking too much, I've become super grateful for gamepad support in those games. Honestly, the only games I play on mouse and keyboard anymore are shooters, and even then, half of the third person ones I play on gamepad.

[Moot]

my number one accessibility gripe that (to my (slightly busted) eyes) a lot of developers don't seem to take seriously at all is colourblind support lol

granted, in my case its less of a constant major problem and more of a repeating annoyance but like. whenever i poke through a games options and hone in on the colourblind accessibility options to find out that the only thing they offer are filters that make the entire screen the wrong colour, i have to resign myself to the fact i just might not be able to see important stuff in this game properly

like i don't have a problem with the entire screen, i have problems with certain colours getting lost in the background so now your filters have solved nothing for me and also everything looks like ass! it must be some sort of one click accessibility solution in engines these days because so many games launch with this exact type of thing and personally speaking, i don't know anyone that finds them at all useful

compared to something like overwatch (lol) where the colours for friendly and enemy teams and abilities and even character silhouettes are already a decent default, they let you tweak just about every UI colour under the sun as well as team vfx. even something like apex legends letting me adjust the colours of the reticles on sights to bright yellow helped me out a ton because like. red dot sights can just turn invisible to me. to be sure it didn't make me any better at the game, but at least i wasn't confused about where my reticle was lmao

its still slightly wild that one or more the last of us remakes came out with what was essentially a magnum opus of accessibility options and that seemingly nobody since then has learned anything from it

sorry to anyone who knows me for bringing this up AGAIN it just boils my piss

[xwildwhirlx]

My hands very easily cramp up when doing things like buttonmashing, quick time events, or other fast and demanding inputs, so it’s always very frustrating to me when they’re not made optional (or at least easier on my hands)
Because of this, certain games are very difficult for me - such as rhythm games - and while I understand that for non-disabled people the difficulty is part of the challenge and fun, it’s just not fun (or even doable) for me, and I’d appreciate more options

Specific examples of moments which have given me trouble:
- the buttonmashing quick time events in Sonic games
- the poffin minigame in Pokemon
- Mario minigames
- fighting games like Smash Bros

[NovaSquirrel]

Since NES games are really easy to hack now, I've dug into some and tried to remove excessive flashing from some games myself so more people can play them, like Cocoron which previously had a lot of full-screen flashes when defeating bosses.

Petal Crash is a color matching game that actually bothers to provide alternative graphics for color blind players, and one of the characters uses those graphics on their board when you play against them as a fun little touch because he's canonically color blind.

[Lolo De Puzlo]

Since NES games are really easy to hack now, I've dug into some and tried to remove excessive flashing from some games myself so more people can play them, like Cocoron which previously had a lot of full-screen flashes when defeating bosses.

Petal Crash is a color matching game that actually bothers to provide alternative graphics for color blind players, and one of the characters uses those graphics on their board when you play against them as a fun little touch because he's canonically color blind.

Honestly debating putting a bounty on a patch to remove the thunder flashing (or ideally limiting it how the Taito Egret Mini did) on Legend of Kage. I don't think there's been a patch for that on NES yet.

[StarlightNecromancer]

My hands very easily cramp up when doing things like buttonmashing, quick time events, or other fast and demanding inputs, so it’s always very frustrating to me when they’re not made optional (or at least easier on my hands)
Because of this, certain games are very difficult for me - such as rhythm games - and while I understand that for non-disabled people the difficulty is part of the challenge and fun, it’s just not fun (or even doable) for me, and I’d appreciate more options

Specific examples of moments which have given me trouble:
- the buttonmashing quick time events in Sonic games
- the poffin minigame in Pokemon
- Mario minigames
- fighting games like Smash Bros

Honestly it makes me appreciate that Dying Light 2 has an option to make the quick time event in it a hold option, rather than mashing X

[vurrsys]

Since NES games are really easy to hack now, I've dug into some and tried to remove excessive flashing from some games myself so more people can play them, like Cocoron which previously had a lot of full-screen flashes when defeating bosses.

Gosh I appreciate people like you making games more accessible so much... thank you genuinely, your work really does make an impact

[Ace]

Since NES games are really easy to hack now, I've dug into some and tried to remove excessive flashing from some games myself so more people can play them, like Cocoron which previously had a lot of full-screen flashes when defeating bosses.

Whoa, this is so cool. I am only a little photosensitive, but I do get a pounding headache if there’s *severe* flashing for prolonged periods (think strobes for a single song at a concert), so this is still really nice. Thank you for what you do =)

[synthcryptid]

my number one accessibility gripe that (to my (slightly busted) eyes) a lot of developers don't seem to take seriously at all is colourblind support lol

whenever i poke through a games options and hone in on the colourblind accessibility options to find out that the only thing they offer are filters that make the entire screen the wrong colour, i have to resign myself to the fact i just might not be able to see important stuff in this game properly

your filters have solved nothing for me and also everything looks like ass! it must be some sort of one click accessibility solution in engines these days because so many games launch with this exact type of thing and personally speaking, i don't know anyone that finds them at all useful

surprisingly, it's not a particularly common feature in engines and renderers! but what is a common feature among engines and renderers is colorblind simulation. these exist primarily for the developers themselves to verify that their game is compatible for those with colorblindness

which is a really great thing to have as a standard tool in any developer's toolkit, colorblind or not!

except uh

it's extremely common for developers to end up integrating those colorblindness simulation filters under the label of colorblind accessibility. when they are in fact a debug tool to help devs ensure their game is properly colorblindness-compatible, which would negate the need for a colorblindness compensation filter to begin with. and this is often paired with extremely obvious signs that the devs have made absolutely no attempt to ensure their game is colorblind-accessible, with copious amounts of reds/greens as contrasting colors, hues of orange being used to differentiate things, and worse!

and this extends even outside of games! android, for instance, has a colorblind filter as an accessibility option... except it takes exactly a tenth of a second of having it enabled to realize that it is in fact a colorblind simulation filter, since the settings page for it has a very visible assortment of colors. our phone is android 13, so it's entirely possible it could've been fixed in later major versions, but given that it's been that way since android 10, we have low hopes for that

basically, colorblindness is taken with such little seriousness that developers would rather ship a LUT filter simulating colorblindness than actually bother with the bare-minimum of making their games/software colorblind-accessible (using symbols instead of colors for differentiation where possible, making use of colorblind-friendly palettes like the classic blue/orange where it isn't possible to use symbols, allowing the user to customize UI colors to their personal preference, etc etc etc; only the last one there poses any potential development challenge, but everything else is fairly straight-forward)

not even open source projects are safe from this; one of the open source games we're involved with, space station 14, regularly sees random contributors and non-developers being actively hostile towards the notion of properly addressing colorblind accessibility issues as a default. the maintainer team is, thankfully, generally good about shutting down anti-accessibility discourse when it crops up, but it's still deeply tiring to see randos rabidly demand that colorblindness accommodation be optional (even in cases where making the accommodation optional would be incredibly awkward, such as clothing sprites). forks tend to be unplayable for our deuteranomalic ass due to how many of them are outright hostile towards colorblind accessibility compared to the mainline project

[Moot]

strong memories coming back of that Graven game (which ended up being a bit crap for various other reasons) launching in early access with barrels that contain items being virtually the same colour (to me) as explosive barrels

i posted about this being an issue, an e-comrade posted to the devs on twitter about it, got more or less told "we'll look into it" and surprise surprise, the colours stayed identical lmao. meaning i could either waste resources (which were already rare) on shooting barrels from a distance for goodies, or meleeing them like a normal person and having a 50/50 chance of blowing myself to kingdom come. like just put a skull on the ones that blow up, or TNT, or literally anything at all

[StarlightNecromancer]

strong memories coming back of that Graven game (which ended up being a bit crap for various other reasons) launching in early access with barrels that contain items being virtually the same colour (to me) as explosive barrels

i posted about this being an issue, an e-comrade posted to the devs on twitter about it, got more or less told "we'll look into it" and surprise surprise, the colours stayed identical lmao. meaning i could either waste resources (which were already rare) on shooting barrels from a distance for goodies, or meleeing them like a normal person and having a 50/50 chance of blowing myself to kingdom come. like just put a skull on the ones that blow up, or TNT, or literally anything at all

This is such an easy issue to fix, it's not like every barrel is a unique object with its own ID. Just slap a png on the texture and call it a day

[Moot]

so you'd think, but no, they never bothered to do anything about it. i haven't checked it for a while and definitely not since got unceremoniously shoved out of early access but with how the game ended up shaking out i'm not really missing out by not playing it i think haha

[EcoHound]

On another avenue of accessibility, I stumbled on this video last year


He eventually landed on something called the Azeron Cyro

Hidden text.

[synthcryptid]

This is such an easy issue to fix, it's not like every barrel is a unique object with its own ID. Just slap a png on the texture and call it a day

and it is indeed an easy thing to fix! it took us 5 minutes in krita to whip up a properly colorblind-compatible retexture. and then it took us 2 hours of getting the specific necessary unreal engine SDK version used by the game installed, and coaxing it into giving us a proper standalone .pak export. epic games has a very """functional""" launcher, and unreal engine has the UX of all time. thanks a lot tim fortnite

it ain't winning any awards for prettiness, but we tossed it up on nexusmods regardless!


ALSO!

He eventually landed on something called the Azeron Cyro

that thing genuinely looks rad as hell! it's badass in a way that a lot of gamer-themed peripherals can only ever dream of achieving

though we're mildly sad that azeron doesn't really market it as an accessibility device! or even market it much at all, for that matter. it deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten!

[EcoHound]

ALSO!

He eventually landed on something called the Azeron Cyro

that thing genuinely looks rad as hell! it's badass in a way that a lot of gamer-themed peripherals can only ever dream of achieving

though we're mildly sad that azeron doesn't really market it as an accessibility device! or even market it much at all, for that matter. it deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten!

I'm curious about it just for how it could feel. WASD movement on a thumbstick with mouse/keyboard controls for everything else. Plus it looks like there might be enough buttons for MMO controls on one hand

[Gabu]

i'm not as young as i used to be and nowadays i greatly appreciate accessibility options to tone down or even just trivialize QTEs. can't be mashing buttons at max speed anymore.

in particular one of the first games i enabled this for was spider-man ps4 which had an extremely extensive options menu and just lets you do like "hold button instead of mash" and even just auto-complete QTEs altogether

recently i'd been playing the new Fantasy Life and while its a really good game, the crafting QTEs are. real bad. its a mix of having to press the right buttons with timing, holding down the button (these are still fine for me) but then also mashing a button as fast as you can, and (the worst) rotating the right stick as fast as you can??? haven't we learned from mario party 64 not to do this?

and the bad part is this game has no accessibility options to change this at all. the crafting minigames are annoyingly tightly timed too where you have to do everything at almost the max speed it lets you to get a Perfect...

[StarlightNecromancer]

I was actually playing Abiotic Factor with the lads tonight and actually was pleasently surprised by the breath of accessibility options in the game!

Hidden text.

Arachnophobia is getting pretty common but the fact that the have an emetophobia mode too is also really nice! And one to deal with needles!

[Necrotext]

i'm not as young as i used to be and nowadays i greatly appreciate accessibility options to tone down or even just trivialize QTEs. can't be mashing buttons at max speed anymore.

Yeah I've had growing wrist issues since i was 13, so like, 23 years now, and i got issues from having to write a lot in school. Turns out my wrist/paw cannot handle doing lots of intensive movement for long periods. And while I can keep it at bay with wrist braces and sleeping at specific positions at night; as well as not doing to much with games or art at a time. I was reminded how bad it was when Enby and I streamed RE5. The section of the village in the marsh where you have to crank the platform across was awful. I became instantly glad we had QTEs off for the other parts of the game.

I've personally dealt with most of my problems by having things like vertical mice, or low profile controllers that don't require a tight grasp. Basically been using leverless since 2012 and now a days they come real thin- but I use it for anything from fighting games to platformers. If it works it gets use. But since adopting it things got better for me.

[Mixi Blacksand]

I've personally dealt with most of my problems by having things like vertical mice, or low profile controllers that don't require a tight grasp. Basically been using leverless since 2012 and now a days they come real thin- but I use it for anything from fighting games to platformers. If it works it gets use. But since adopting it things got better for me.

Have you seen those SWORL controllers that add analog thumb 'domes' to the leverless layout? I've only seen them in passing but I wonder how well they work to expand the number of games playable on that layout.

[Necrotext]

Have you seen those SWORL controllers that add analog thumb 'domes' to the leverless layout?

I have not seen these as a matter of fact. Its terribly interesting. I would imagine it would do the job well if you need it for something like 3D games. I'd even be willing to give it a go but my pride month gift to me was a new stick so I'm going to be coasting for awhile. But watching some youtube videos gets the idea across. I think its cool though that things like this are chugging along because it makes a huge difference for someone like me. Like genuinely these controllers are the only reason I can play and stream Mario like I do