Accessibility: map icons

Guides UI and Macro
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I wanted to share feedback about the icons and accessibility from a vision perspective. I appreciate all the efforts in 11.0 to make new and interesting icons, and to make them visually distinctive. I struggle with vision (not the colorblind kind) and the high-contrast icons are great.

That said, some of the icon changes actually made them harder to distinguish against the world map! Particularly the new flight master icon, the Dungeon and Raid icons, the teleport point, and the cave entrance icon, which all actually lost contrast. The flight master lost contrast and happens to be nearly the same color yellowish tan as the world map. Even the red and blue flight master icons (for horde and alliance) are severely lacking in contrast, and while they aren’t the exact tan of the world map like the neutral flight points, the new less saturated colors are still difficult to see against the map. The Dungeon and Raid icons lost contrast and while there was a glow added behind those 2, the glow happens to also be nearly the same tan color as the zone maps. The teleport point was reduced in contrast as well, with the red and blue colors being toned down in saturation to be like the flight points, with similar reduction to visibility in similar ways. The Cave Entrance was changed from gray with dark outlines, which is high visibility, to nearly the same tan color as both the flight master icon AND the zone maps.

11 Likes
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I have vision problems as well and with all these new changes and a map legend you think you would be able to click on the “flight point” and toggle it on or off. This isn’t the case. Now you have to continue to hover over whatever you were looking for in the legend because as soon as you move to the map to zoom in you aren’t hovering over that legend icon to highlight it!
And don’t even get me started on font scaling. Yes you can increase the font size of things like character name sizes, and yes the quest text contrast is amazing and you can rescale the quest font and the chat font. Other than that nothing else. Now what can I do? Do I increase the size of the UI so I can read the talent tree and spell book but have this massive UI that fills all the monitor space? And it’s not like I have a small monitor. It’s a 27 inch and I’m running it in 2560x1440. Especially when the new spell book doesn’t allow for choosing contrast. Why can’t we have control of the font for all HUD Elements? I understand that the font may not fit in buttons for instance. But I would rather have larger font that hangs off the edge of certain buttons or windows or other things like that then not have the option at all.

Now I get it, my eyes are bad and personally I’ve had to find things like the addon “Scale UI Font”. And I’m grateful there are addons such as this. I’m a very small percentage of the player base with these types of conditions. I’m also lucky because there are individuals who have made addons like “Scale UI Font” and continue to update them for each expansion. If not I wouldn’t be able to experience the game as well as I do now. And I think that is a shame. This should just be an option. And it’s not trying to diminish any work that the developers have done so far. This is a game I’ve enjoyed since vanilla and hopefully I can for years to come.

5 Likes
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I agree, the new flight master icon is very difficult to distinguish.

As soon as I saw the new map previewed on wowhead, I knew the dungeon and raid icons were going to be problematic in the way you described.

The new daily quest markers are problematic as well. When you pick up a quest from an NPC dialogue, the ! marker is very faded and difficult to see. The daily quest marker doesn’t need to have the arrowed lines around it as it only further muddies what you are looking at, but the blue color is also more faded and the glow just blends the marker into the environment. It also reduced the size of the icon, so the arrows are barely distinguishable anyway. The old bright standalone ? and ! are all that is necessary. I understand adding the shield for campaign quests, but we are getting out of control with the quest markers now.

These are just major UX/UI issues regardless of what any person’s individual vision capability is, but the Dragonflight UI revamp had several issues, as well that were not addressed. We still have neon green health bars with fine white health text information over it.

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You may want to move this over to the Customer Support forums as you’re more likely to get Blue eyes on it there. Though, they may just send you back here.

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They will. They make a point of saying no one in the Support Forum can provide or forward any feedback to the developers. Only posts in the Bug Reports forum have any chance of being seen by devs, and only if they’re actual bugs (stuff not working the way the developers intended). Stuff that the devs intended will always be ignored there.

Posting places like here is one of the recommended ways of providing feedback.

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A couple additions to my response since I realize OP is mainly talking about maps specifically and I’m also adding a few environmental issues:

  1. The flight master icon that is over a flight master’s head is also difficult for me, because it’s harder to distinguish the flight master where there is a lot of background clutter. I noticed it more in MOP remix, so maybe it’s clearer in current expansion graphics where there are not a lot of other surroundings. The one on the map definitely does not stand out enough, but they also need a balance so that it doesn’t look overly cluttered with all the new icons that were added.
  2. The daily quest marker on the mini map is actually crisp and well defined, but I have more issues with the ones on quest dialogues and in the open world over an NPC’s head. The glow and tint used, in addition to the line arrows make it more easily get lost and looks out of place. It’s also most likely using more pixel-based graphical scaling where the icon is maybe vector based?

Also not an accessibility issue but more of a counterpoint/design complaint, but having something be very obvious and clear can also be a poor design choice and can easily clash with the environment. Every time I see an NPC like the screenshot below makes me cringe. I guess ! and ? do not break immersion to me since they’ve been around forever, but big purple triangles and ellipses over their heads feel out of place lol. Especially if they are NPCs that follow you or patrol around like the one in Scholomance.

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I do not have vision problems (nothing color/etc related that I am aware of, anyway) and won’t pretend otherwise when speaking about accessibility issues, however I too have an extremely hard time seeing these icons.

PS: Also, not sure if it was mentioned already but just in case – it’s almost impossible to line your mouse up to see if there are any active/upcoming world events now if you also have a quest for the corresponding location. IE: time rifts, superblooms, researchers under fire, etc. Horrible design choice to make the quest icon about 1 pixel smaller than the event icon.

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I agree with all of the comments made above re: icon visibility. The daily quest icon with the tiny circular arrows around it is difficult to distinguish. Both the ! version and the (…) version. Especially those tiny arrows, they feel very pointless to me and “muddy” the readability of the icon. (previously the blue plain !) The (…) with tiny arrows around it on the world map is very very tiny indeed. That would probably be easier to “read” if it was a blue (…) with no arrows, similar to the normal quest turnin icon is now, but using the color to distinguish them. I could imagine using color alone to distinguish might be hampered for colorblindness, but I’m not familiar enough with how the colorblind accessibility settings map the colors over to know if it would pose a problem.

I too am not a fan of the (…) icon over npc’s heads, though not from an accessibility standpoint. It stands out very well visually, it’s just very very large. I do prefer the old style turnin icon, the gray ? one. I’ll probably adjust to the (…) over heads, but I am not a fan of it on the world map. I’m still trying to figure out when the map is using the (…) with arrows versus the (?) with arrows - they seem to both be used for both quests in progress as well as quests waiting to be turned in?

Yeah, having quest icons slightly smaller than those special event icons (eg time rifts, etc) makes it hard to see if I have a quest in that area. And I know there are quest hubs at multiple of those locations, like Time Rifts, Soup, Superbloom. Actually, the event icons are just massive generally and get in the way of basically anything on the map that is underneath them. For example, the entire island of Iskaara and the flight point there. Edit: Actually, I wonder if this was changed, because now the quest icons are appearning on top of the giant event icons. I do like that better. Still hides flight paths or underlying map, but at least I can see quests now

I was wondering why I had such a hard time seeing the flight master icons over npc heads in Remix, I didn’t even connect the dots that those icons were changed. But yes, I have been having trouble seeing them too. I’m not sure if they were made smaller or the color was changed or what. I’ll have to go test on a retail character that hasn’t discovered flight points yet (although, hallelujah for the flight point heirloom toys, 100% worth buying).

That’s a great idea of making the Map Legend icons toggle the highlight on and off! The hovering and having them light up is good, but I’ve run into the same problem as you, if I want to zoom into a place and as soon as my mouse leaves the legend the highlight turns off. My solution is to zoom in then hover again, but I would love to be able to toggle it so I could pan and zoom in and out without having to alternate map movement and icon highlighting.

3 Likes