I’ve brought up this topic before, but hoping this gets some sort of traction.
As someone is slightly deaf in both ears and is colorblind (protanopia and tritanomaly - can’t see red and can only see some shades of blue), this game’s accessibility leaves a lot to be desired.
The current complaints I have about it:
The subtitles don’t have enough options for what to include/exclude - I either enable it so I hear in-game voiceline commands, such as “I Need Healing” “Group Up”, but am vulnerable to the voiceline spam that people enjoy doing, or I hear none of it.
Subtitles don’t tell me anything directionally, it just centers on my screen. While that’s great…I’d like to be given some form of indication of where it’s coming from. I don’t need it to telegraphed to me in a way that provides an advantage, I just need a hint of what general direction it came from.
The colorblind filters are useless - this is something a lot of games do with the filters. It is very rare for a person to be only one type of colorblind. Adding these filters rarely solves someone’s colorblind issues. It may alleviate one type of colorblind while worsening the others. It’s not helpful at all.
Additionally, giving us the ability to change the color of enemy/ally outlines is helpful but it doesn’t change the color of deployables, such as shields. This is a huge hinderance.
– At one point, we had a glitch that allowed us to have the OWL-team colors for beams, shields, etc. So…evidently, it is possible. That was IMMEASURABLY helpful, and I’m sad it didn’t come back.
I just…want to enjoy this game, and I want to be hyped for OW2. But I can’t tell you how many games I feel like I have to give up on because of the fact that I am hard of hearing and just can’t see color properly, which ultimately makes me an afterthought at best for gaming companies.
Will we be getting better accessibility options for OW2? At the very least I want to move away from the colorblind filters. They historically suck for every game and no game that implements this actually seems to help people who are colorblind of any kind.
As someone that suffers from deuteranomalous trichromacy, i can somewhat understand your struggle and agree that there needs to be better QOL for colourblinds
It’s not the biggest thing in the world, but it’s how the little hindrances can screw you over in monumental ways. My biggest one is how changing the outlines of deployables don’t work, and sometimes I can’t tell if my Wrecking Ball is the one who ulted or theirs…and I have to just assume everything is out to murder me lol
I always wondered why they didn’t implement this for the colorblind options. I also entirely agree that the subtitles are horrible in this game and should at least have directionality.
I’m all for improving accessibility wherever it’s lacking. The addition of real colorblind options (i.e. team UI colors) completely changed the game for me, to the degree that it got me playing again even while the Release Brigitte issue was still around at the time.
I’m currently pretty satisfied with the available options for my own accessibility needs, with a few exceptions:
There’s no option to change the UI color for your group members. It’s required to always be green, which is the worst possible color for me (looks identical to yellow, which is otherwise the ideal enemy color for me).
Wrecking Ball’s mines always have red outlines, regardless of the selected enemy color, instead of adopting the correct color like other constructs (turrets, tires, etc.).
Anytime I see anything like this in the gaming world it makes me really disappointed. I’m very lucky that I am completely able bodied and can enjoy games in their full with no special altering. As blizzard has stated many times they are “committed to equality and inclusivity for everyone” But this just isn’t true. I hope in the future accessibility is so flawless that the game is no different for you.
I can’t fault them too much for it; they’ve certainly made an effort to add better accessibility options over time in response to feedback. I do wish they’d taken a little more time to gather feedback and refine their new accessibility features immediately after adding them, though.
As a game developer myself, I’ve seen countless cases of colorblind accessibility falling through the cracks during production, because it’s very difficult for people to recognize that type of problem on sight without being directly affected by it. At a past job, they made a point of having me test all of the games (even though I was an engineer and not a QA analyst), because I would immediately notice contrast problems that simply aren’t visible to people with full color vision.
Granted, Blizzard has a much larger team, and they should have QA personnel who are familiar with a variety of accessibility concerns, but that’s not actually something that game companies are used to looking for when hiring.
I will say that Microsoft has an excellent track record of ensuring accessibility for impairments of all sorts in their software, and that standard is reflected in most if not all of the games published by Microsoft Game Studios. I’m interested to see what changes will happen after the purchase, when Blizzard’s active and future projects will presumably be required to meet Microsoft’s high standards in that area.
I’d lie if I said it wasn’t disheartening. It makes me feel like gaming just isn’t for me; I’m not a consideration.
But I’ve also seen games actually put the effort in, and the results make me feel included. Back 4 Blood surprisingly has great options. You can change the color of everything to what you can see. They give you the color palette.
I’m hopeful other companies can follow suit if they just simply cared.
To add to what the OP has listed most modern games have an option to disable screenshake in games. Having more options to customize the kill feed would be awesome as well. Maybe these things are low priority to blizzard because the community affected by these settings seems smaller, but I would argue the whole community benefits from having more options.
Something that would probably solve all these issues is color sliders for UI, effects, and deployables/barriers.
Wish we had color sliders for skins as well not just for accessibility but as a cosmetic option. So many skins I’d like much more if I could change the colors on them.
You’re always vulnerable to it. I don’t know why is that still a thing in this game. And how the subtitles apply to those as well the argument that “it’s not spam cause it’s not in text” falls apart.
Good point, would be a simple ‘toggle voice lines’ yes/no sort of thing.
Problem being, leaves Blizz open to the majority disabling voice lines which is a current monetized feature…(loot boxes)
A directional arrow to the left of the statement (or right) would help I’d imagine?
Are you suggesting a ‘toggle/cycle/color option’? This part seems more of a rant which is not productive at all to be fair…
I wouldn’t think it would be much additional work to cater to this but be mindful it would filter to everything in the game potentially.
A compromise might be major things such as shields, turrets, health packs etc but not the terrain?
Accessibility in gaming is an interesting topic. As you, yourself pointed out when discussing the colorblind filters, the combinations are complex but at some point the company has to draw a line and cannot be catering a game to an individual/small percentage of people that may or may not ever play the game over the vast majority of users.
That said, most the changes you suggested seem simple enough to implement and I wish you well. I’d suggest an email to Blizz but I’d suggest leaving out the dramatic/rant parts, stick to solutions.
Honestly, FFXIV has one that I think is helpful. It just kind of has a sound bar and it’ll vibrate depending on how close/far something is from you to indicate where the sound is coming from. I find that IMMENSELY helpful.
I mention this because these are under “colorblind assist” and they don’t, actually, ever assist anyone. Most games tend to have this as their only form of colorblind assistance. My pointing this out is to educate any devs that the filters aren’t at all helpful to anyone who is colorblind.
It’s not necessarily a rant. Rather, pointing out this isn’t helpful at all. And this is what we started out our accessibility options with in Overwatch.
I’m not necessarily looking for them to do anything groundbreaking. Rather, to just meet the standard that some games have set that actually significantly help those with hearing and visual impairments. The games that actually offer options that do help us access the game and not be at a significant disadvantage.
I don’t find this to be a dramatic rant. I actually find that insinuation offensive given that I have not ranted about anything, but rather shared the knowledge that colorblind filters are, in actuality, useless to assisting colorblind players. And I think this is part because this is a standard in the industry, and they haven’t actually consulted anyone who is colorblind to understand how these filters are useless.
