Hi! I’m Cambios. I applied to the WoW Community Council mainly to talk about accessibility and the ways it can be improved.
Let me start by mentioning my particular condition: I have color blindness, more specifically I’m a strong protan. As a raider it has been a recurrent issue because some spells/effects/mechanics rely heavily on colors, and it affects me with the time that I spend figuring out things, and also affects the people that I play with.
Let me also state that the accessibility options in WoW are very good, especially compared to other games that don’t even have them or are very basic. That being said I have two problems:
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Color blind filters aren’t as helpful sometimes. Sometimes they change colors that you clearly see and it can solve your initial problem, but generate others in the process.
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As I said, some mechanics rely so heavily on colors that they become an additional step in the learning curve. While many of them have been patched as time went by, they get in the way in the initial days of progression. As an example, I remember going against Maiden of Vigilance in Tomb of Sargeras and Mekkatorque in the Battle of Dazar’alor and suffering every second.
This kind of boss encounters have been improved over the years. For example, the Relocators in the fight against So’azmi in Taza’vesh are indicated with a simple shape instead of a color/complex shape/a mix of the two.
I can only talk first hand about my particular point of view, but I encourage you to talk about anything you struggle with. Even if you don’t have any condition, please consider exploring this topic or reaching someone you know that may have one. I’m sure there’s people out there with ideas to improve the accessibility options for a wide variety of problems.
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I can speak to my recent experience. I’m a strong deutan myself and only recently turned on colorblind filters, after having played years without them (not knowing they existed). It’s been a black and white change for me.
I started seeing that the health bar and focus/energy colors… were different (as silly as that sounds). I am now also able to very easily determine items that are rare (blue) vs epic qualities (purple) because the colors have become immediately distinguishable.
I only enabled colorblind filters because of Heroic Sylvanas progression. During the domination chain ability, certain swirlies have shifted/darker color tints to indicate that they will leave a chain behind, needed to perform P1 mechanics. I could not see this without having the colorblind filter enabled and you could imagine my confusion when everyone else in my raid was completely aware of where the chains would land.
This being said, appropriate alternative visual indicators should exist so a reliance on colors for mechanics is not needed or not made the standard. Using the Sylvanas example, a completely separate “swirly” visual could’ve been used to show where the chains would land. Mekkatorque is another great example. While I managed the symbol mechanic on mythic myself, another in my raid who was severly colorblind had to result to calling out the symbol instead of the color.
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I have a friend who is deaf and unable to use voice coms but loves PvP it has always astonished me that blizzard does not have a way of sending a heads up display type message to teammates for people who are unable to type quickly. Some of this you can get around with macros and raid warnings but if certain specific call outs need to be said they have literally nothing they can do except try to type out what is happening and what they need and in PvP if u waste a few seconds its usually a huge deal.
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This is a great point. I quite like the idea of a toggleable accessibility HUD similar to Overwatch’s ‘wheel’; you hit a keybind that brings up that HUD and are shown a radial menu with an array of click-to-send pre-fabbed (or customizable) options, such as “EFC tunnel” or “big inc” or “Follow me” and so on; the possibilities are endless and this would be great for PvE as well. You could even set up multiple profiles on the HUD wheel for different battlegrounds, boss fights, or situations.
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Exactly! something that would generally just help people who have difficulty communicating on the fly.
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I am a mild/slight tritan in one eye (tritanomaly) and a worse tritan (tritanopia) in the other. The difference between them can sometimes help me, oddly enough. Blues are the hardest for me.
Anyway, I wanted to call out a recent change I greatly appreciated. In the Penitence of Purity treasure, this is what the swirlies on the ground USED to look like:
And now they look like this:
This has helped me a lot in seeing these things more clearly. Just wanted to show an example of what has helped me.
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I have a type of retinal detachment that occurred in my right eye. For some reason this has impacted my ability to see certain things that are monochrome in nature; a black and white photograph is fine, but putting a black spot on a white background makes the entire thing very difficult to see.
As a result of this I struggle immensely with Spires of Ascenion, specifically the debuffs that are put on the ground and the orbs that come out from some of the bosses. I physically cannot see those things and rely on pure luck as well as some assistance from others to tell me how to position properly.
I understand that I may be completely unique in this, but I just wanted to share as it was part of the topic.
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