Removing Addons = Removing Accessibility: A Blind Player’s Perspective

Community General Discussion
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Hey everyone,

I’m legally blind, living with a rare condition called Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON).
Even with my disability, I’ve played this game for years — not casually, but well. I raid, I PvP, I contribute. And I do it almost entirely through sound.

Every mechanic I survive, every cooldown I manage, every movement I make — it’s all thanks to addons with audio alerts.
WeakAuras, DBM, BigWigs — these aren’t “quality of life” for me; they’re essential accessibility tools.

When I hear that Blizzard may restrict or remove addons - especially those that provide audio cues or automated callouts - it honestly feels like being told I no longer belong here.

These addons don’t make me overpowered.
They make me able.

They let me:

  • Hear debuff countdowns and cooldown timers
  • Know when to move out of puddles or danger zones
  • React when I’m targeted or affected by mechanics
  • Follow boss patterns and phases through audio feedback

Without them, I lose all situational awareness. Without them, I’m not just at a disadvantage - I’m excluded.

I always thought the goal was to make the game more inclusive, not less.
Accessibility isn’t about automation - it’s about participation.

Please, Blizzard - before finalizing any addon restrictions, consult the accessibility community.
For players like me, addons aren’t convenience - they are connections.
They’re what allow us to stay part of this world we love.

Accessibility isn’t a special favor - it’s what keeps gaming open to everyone.

I do not know where to post this, please, redirect me if this is wrong section

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A fresh take for sure

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How did you type that and how do you plan on replying to comments ITT?

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What if I think taking a visual media and crippling it to appeal to people with vision issues makes a inferior experience?

I feel like at some point compromise becomes destructive. While making wow a game controlled by nodding your head up and down to vibrations through a special control without any visual or audible feedback would make it more accessible I think the game would suffer for it.

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This is a rough situation, because if Blizzard has decided limiting addons in-combat is the way to go for the health of the game as a whole, there’s not really a way to keep these kinds of features for blind or otherwise disabled players while also accomplishing their goals for the average player.

If you limit addons but start adding audio alerts and such that you could get or make through combat addons as accessibility toggles, you’ve just reintroduced some of the things they see as a problem and non-disabled players are enabling the toggles to get that advantage back.

Where is the line on designing the game they want to design vs having expanded accessibility options that interfere with their design goals?

Idk. It’s unfortunate because to some extent, there is no softening that blow. If they land on the design side of that line, there WILL be people who are:

Which obviously sucks for those impacted, and obviously creates bad PR for Blizzard, but from a pure numbers standpoint doesn’t really affect them unless regular players boycott over it, which is unlikely.

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I agree. And accessibility features should be offered as part of the base game.

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Hello everyone.
First, I’d like to say that I think this post is very important. I’m glad Djzugzug shared the situation, and I hope other people who use add-ons for this purpose will speak out. I welcome the removal of add-ons; I personally don’t like relying on them. But this discontent pales in comparison to the idea that someone, even just one person, will lose access to the game I love so much because of this.
I don’t have any visual impairment, but I work as a distance teacher and have had countless students with varying degrees of vision loss. So I’m speaking from the experience of someone who has already learned a lot precisely because I had no idea about this universe: most blind people don’t have total vision loss. Some can see within a portion of their vision, others see everything as a blur, others can only see lights, etc. It’s diverse and very varied; I don’t think any of us who have vision without any loss can understand this.
I’m saying this: even completely blind people are completely capable of using computers and playing games, as long as they have the necessary support. In fact, there are many developers who are blind. These people access the internet primarily using screen readers, which are extremely efficient programs in a digital world where accessibility concerns are low or non-existent.
So, I imagine some of the comments on these posts come from a place of ignorance. I also had no idea how people with visual loss or blindness could use a computer until I met these people and learned. But see this as an opportunity to learn and, more importantly, to support a player who, like you, just wants to have fun. Of course I’m excited about the changes, but I want the game to be accessible to everyone. Do you really think the possibility of someone using an accessibility feature to gain an advantage justifies its absence? I really don’t think so. I’d rather live with the risk of people exploiting the feature inappropriately, as they do with any other feature in the game.
Players who want to take advantage of exploits will always do so. We can minimize them, of course, but it seems pretty insensitive to think we can exclude an entire segment of players just because a few people might exploit this feature.
I’m not sure how I could contribute to getting this story read on Blizzard, but I really hope this post will be considered for the implementation of new accessibility features.

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WoW is already incredibly poor at delivering audible feedback unless you get hit by a melee critical strike. Why do you think these addons exist? :brain:

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Blizzard’s stated goals initially revolved around certain Addons doing too much in terms of communication / coordination / lowering requirements of decision making on player and group level during combat.

That’s something I can get behind.

At the same time they repeatedly put emphasis on still being able to change / impove visuals to the player’s liking.

The seemingly obvious overlap being addons that alter(ed) visual cues during combat and or added auditory cues on individual player level.

GTFO “screaming” at me doesn’t actually lower the requirement of decision making. I still have to move out if the danger zone. It merely adds an auditory component to certain visual effects that can be drowned out for various reasons.

A personal WeakAura that visualizes certain buff states on myself and / or adds auditory cues is the same.

The true conflict with actual design only arises whenever the addon reacts to stuff not happening / unrelated to the individual player’s toon but on group level.

Blizzard’s current solution? Disable all access to combat related functionalities in their entirety along with chat functionalities during combat instead of creating a solution that prohibits addons from communicating beyond the player’s local client. Reason: the former is way easier to implement and at first glance less prone to clever addon programmers circumventing the limitation.

While personally not truly affected because my days in group content where these things predominently occur are long over this current path seems part “lazy” and part “exclusionary” with subtle hints of “(unintentionally?) recreating the elite of the few”.

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You can make.fonts very large on computers or he had someone type it in for him.

You can also use speech to text on phones and computers.

Fun fact:

You can be legally blind by not being completely blind.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/legally-blind

https://afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/eye-conditions/low-vision-and-legal-blindness-terms-and-descriptions

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The addon did in fact, make a decision for you. It told you that you were standing in bad, trivializing the mechanic. Just like it would trivialize it if it helped you figure out you had an important buff or debuff. Or any of a litany of other information related problem solving that you’d normally have to do yourself, if not for add-ons doing that thinking for you.

As for the OP’s overall post, it’s unfortunate, but at some point the gameplay needs to come before “accessibility”. I think blizzard should do a better job of adding both audible and visual cues to mechanics, but removing mechanics or allowing add-ons to continue distorting encounter design, isn’t the solution.

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  1. So far only combat addons are banned, not others
  2. Accessibility addon function should be integrated in default settings.
  3. Blizzard removes accessibility addons = those functions will be integrated. 100%
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Play the game at the best of your ability with the given tools.

Right now I don’t know what will be available 100% and I’m waiting until I can test it myself.

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I don’t agree, you must be very biased if you suggest that seeing a character on flames from standing in fire not meaning a decision having been made by the same logic.

But then I agree - I’m not asking to distort or simplify mechanical design.
My concern is that nothing seems to be added on the audible cues side of things.

I play Mythic+, raids, and PvP, regularly running +14s and +15s, and I don’t have any addon telling me what to do. I don’t use Hekili or any cooldown rotation helpers straight up telling you your next cast.

Sure, I get countdowns for ability casts when they start, an alert when I’m targeted, and sounds when effects like Beast Cleave activate or fade — so I can stay aware of what’s happening. I also get audio cues when Call of the Wild, Trueshot, or Coordinated Assault come off cooldown.
But that’s no different from you seeing those same things on your screen.

If you see your character standing in flames, that’s a cue.
For me, a sound serves the exact same purpose.

I just hope Blizzard ensures that audio cues and options are built into the future of the game.

For example, I use TellMeWhen (TMW) mainly to enlarge ability icons to 5–8 times their normal size so I can actually see them - just like some players prefer cleaner or custom UIs. I also rely on sound alerts for things like Bloodlust/Heroism fading or when I get Power Infusion, since I wouldn’t otherwise notice those effects.

The audible feedback isn’t automation - it’s information.

And lastly, I don’t think complex WeakAura management or custom aura creation should give players an advantage. That’s not healthy design either.
But the solution shouldn’t be to remove accessibility tools entirely.

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The goal is to have accessibility options be more accessible by having them in-game instead of needing to search externally and use 3rd parties.

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You’re obviously confusing a sensory input with decision making and are clearly biased by the fact that you have the priviledge of being an unaffected human that operates with 70 to 80% vs. 30 to 20% ratio of visual sensory input vs. the rest of sensory input.

Fact is: The blaring sound of GTFO is an auditory sensory input that may or may not trigger your decision to move your character as reaction in exactly the same way a nice colored circle your character is standing in is a visual sensory input that may or may not trigger the exact same decision as reaction. The visual sensory input is even better than the auditory one because the latter will only tell you in a binary manner if you’re in or out of the danger zone while the former let’s you avoid the danger zone entirely as part of your decision making.

=> Do me a favour and stop wasting my time with such obviously false narratives on things you clearly do not understand well enough.

I tells me exactly the same as the circle on the floor. There’s no trivialization only a shift to a different sensory system that is readily available to me as a human being but is - in part due to technical limitations and in part due to ignorance by the devs - seriously neglected in favour of the dominant sensory system up to the point where that dominant sensory system is overwhelmed even for people that don’t fall into the category of “with disabilities”

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are you tring to compare legally blind with reading text? you have no clue what legally blind is…

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I might be wrong, but pretty sure the new base UI allows you to scale the UI. 5-8 times might be more than it can manage, but I’m also pretty sure that unless the addon pulls combat data or needs to communicate with other people’s add-ons, it should continue to work just fine.

The cues for fading/incoming buffs is almost certainly not going to be supported. It would rely on being able to read combat data. But pretty sure an addon could be made(and probably already exists) that lets you press a key bind to trigger a defined timer with associated sound effect at the end, you’d just need to press it when you heard the lust sound effect.

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Have you tried different hobbies, like driving a big truck around a farmer’s market? (with audio alerts of course)

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The idea of the lust timer is not horrible, but tell me what visual timer any player would have to click to be aware of something?

You have automated visual cues.

The game is already incredibly noisy and sometimes all explosions and casts distort the heroism/bloodlust effect, and when youare focusing on targeting the right mob, kicking spell casts, tab targeting through mobs, doing the rotation (which i enjoy) it is part of the challenge, it is fun, but then having to not be able to know trivial things that are other wise automated through visual cues, i think they should be audible automated cues as well.

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