Colour blindness in text games

-=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- (c) WidthPadding Industries 1987 0\|132\|0 -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=- -=+=-
Socoder -> Concept/Design -> Colour blindness in text games
Thu, 13 May 2010, 08:09
HoboBen	I'm working on a quick game prototype that is mainly just coloured text. I'm using a 16-colour palette, and as different colours will have different meanings it's important that being colour blind doesn't make the game unplayable. In more graphical games you can use different shapes so that colour blindness doesn't matter so much. I'm going to make the 16 colours user-configurable, but is there anything else you can think of? And more generally, has this ever been a problem in your games and what do you do to avoid it? -=-=- blog \| work \| code \| more code
Thu, 13 May 2010, 08:21
bram32	Well, maybe stuff like underlining and italic? And blinking offcourse Actually, I never thought about it. There are different types of colour blindness, right? The only one I am familiair with is not being able to see the difference between red and green. I've heard they then both look as grey.
Thu, 13 May 2010, 08:27
JL235	In the eye you have cones for detecting brightness and 3 types of rods for detecting different light wavelengths (essentially red, green and blue but it's not quite that simple). The eye has far more cones then rods meaning were far more sensetive to brightness then chromaticity (essentially the colour when excluding the brightness). JPEG even encodes the chromaticity of pixels at a lower bitrate then the pixel's brightness, because it's less noticable (this is why heavily compressed JPEGs appear to be shaded in different blocks of colours). So I'd try to keep the brightness of your colours at different values so you can distringuish them even when in greyscale.
Thu, 13 May 2010, 15:51
Evil Roy Ferguso	Try Color Oracle -- you can preview what an image will look like to people with different kinds of color blindness. If there is no suitable color palette, you might want to consider other kinds of visual indicators, as bram32 suggested -- maybe enclosing keywords in () [] {} if no formatting is available. This has been a problem for one of my games in the past -- but I had more wiggle room since it was graphical.