Making Games for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing | Designing for Disability

Cool, upgraded with friendliness and feedback, this is our developers need to learn.

SLG

i Like)

SmailJui

Great games!

trizinc

The following may be useful/interesting when you come to talk about colourblindness, Mark. I worked on Smart As, which was Sony's PS Vita answer to Dr Kawashima's Brain Training on the DS. The game was all about performing challenges in as short a time as possible and your performance determined your score, which we claimed was your intelligence (the reliability of these brain training tests is debatable, but that's another topic). Anyway, many of our minigames included coloured elements and asked the player to differentiate between colours to identify them quickly. But of course, colour blind players can't differentiate between certain colours. In the end we changed the selection of colours we used so that any combination would be identifiable by any form of colourblindness. Because otherwise, well, the way the game scored your intelligence by performance, it would basically be outright calling colourblind people stupid. And that's not very nice, is it.

Matt Glanville

BTW, for your visual disability video, Splatoon has an interesting colorblind option where you can choose to always use the same color ink, with your opponents using a contrasting color.

Érico Lotufo

I love this! I always put subtitles on, and I have in many times started playing a game that doesn’t allow for subtitles when you first play it, skip the first cutscenes until I get the options menu ready and restart from scratch.

Érico Lotufo

I always put on subtitles because I sometimes can’t fully process dialogue in games because of poor lip syncing and uncanny valley effects in faces. I often wonder if the small subtitle issue comes from developers primarily making and playing their games at their desks on monitors, and may not try playing on a couch and tv until it’s “too late” to do anything about it. But I’m not a dev so who knows.

Seth Finkelstein

I always play with subtitles for mere convenience, but sometimes they can be hard to read depending on what is displayed behind them on screen -- I was very pleasantly subscribed to see God of War (2018) give players the option to have subtitles displayed with black box behind them to ensure constant readability!

Ben Salvidrim

This is great, and you have a new Patron. I'm looking forward to where this series goes! My wife has Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 3 (a form of Muscular Dystrophy), and motion control in most games means she can't play them. Even complex inputs on a standard controller can be a deal-breaker. She could get away with the limited flicks and stuff on a standard Wii controller, but as soon as Motion Plus became a thing, she was excluded. Kinect? Forget it. Didn't even recognize her since she's in a wheelchair, not to mention the range of motion required. Games really should have a standard input or automatic options, to be as inclusive as possible. When I see people say "stuff like this lets people cheat/not play the game as intended", it strikes me as extremely short-sighted. Thanks again for this.

Gray-Haired Gamer

Worth noting that colour coding subtitles is great provided those colours (and indeed any other colours the player needs to be able to distinguish) are configurable for colour blind folks! :)

Neil

Great stuff

Neil

This is an especially excellent thing you're doing here, Mark!

Drew Messinger-Michaels & L. Villegas

I remember getting to Eventide Island in Breath of the Wild for the first time and happened to be looking at the bright white sand when the text came on screen. I had NO idea what was happening and why my stuff disappeared :( My favourite thing about adding accessibility to games though is that they more often than not just end up making the game better for everyone, not just those less able

Adam Russell

This is a great idea Mark! Always appreciate how you focus on the positive aspects of gaming.