Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

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JonathanTheBlack
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Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by JonathanTheBlack »

I'm working on a framework and am looking at the formatting for buttons and title bars for powers. I wasn't planning on including the usage (at-will, encounter, etc.) since the color of the button/bar can be used to determine that, but then I got to thinking and now I'm not so sure I want to leave that out. I'm just wondering if there's enough color blind folks around here that a color-blind mode would be worth the effort to code that into the framework somehow.

I'd rather make it a client-side option, so that people who don't want as much clutter on the screen can turn it off, but that's a lot of work if there isn't enough people that are color-blind to make it worth it.

Akodo Makama
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by Akodo Makama »

My boss is red-green colorblind (the most common kind), and according to him, all the colors used by Maptool buttons are easy to distinguish. Green is much brighter than the red on a computer monitor. If there were an option for dark green, I'd avoid it, but full-saturation and brightness, the big-8 (RGBCMYWK) are all ok for him. For someone fully colorblind (or one of the other dozed types), it may be different.

ETA: Attached a sample, showing approximately what every button color looks like to RG and fully colorblind people.
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ColorblindButtons.gif
ColorblindButtons.gif (15.54 KiB) Viewed 28559 times

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JonathanTheBlack
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by JonathanTheBlack »

Oh wow. That's very helpful. I decided to include the usage (at-will/encounter) of a power in it's title bar in the combat log as of right now. It turned out to be easier to just make the text a little smaller for the keywords on the right instead of putting in a big if statement to show power.usage if the colorblind flag was activated. The buttons are separated into groups by usage so that takes care of that color blind issue.

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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by neofax »

Could you possibly use Covered in Fish's MacroIO tool that has your macros dumped out and then you could do a RegEx to search and replace the hard colors to see and re-import the macros? Too bad that the button colors and such couldn't be changed based on a pseudo css-stylesheet in the users MapTools cfg file. This would be pretty nice as then you as the designer of the campaign could make a interface that resembled different settings like a desert feel for Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, Legacy of Fire, forest feel for Kingmaker...

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Azhrei
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by Azhrei »

Akodo Makama wrote:ETA: Attached a sample, showing approximately what every button color looks like to RG and fully colorblind people.
Wow, that's great. Can you define what the second and third groups show?

I see how the first group is two rows, the first being what the RG colorblind individual would see and the second row being the actual color. But I don't understand how to interpret the other groups... Oh, and if you can define which colors you actually selected for those buttons, I'd appreciate it. Perhaps just export the macro groups and attach them to a posting here? I'm thinking I may want to add those palettes to the Accessibility tab of the Preferences as samples...

This is such good information that I'm planning to sticky this thread!

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JonathanTheBlack
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by JonathanTheBlack »

Az, the first group is normal. The second group is R/G colorblind and the third group is total colorblind.

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skester
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by skester »

There's a difference between the first two groups?

As a Red Green colourblind person, sometimes the red and the green I will get mixed up. But I can tell there's a difference between the two of them, they don't look the same.

Skester.

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aku
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by aku »

The differences are mostly in the second line of buttons, as far as i can tell, green is more of a darker/yellowish/pea green color, magenta is more purple, orange is more yellow/green, pink is almost entirely washed out, being greyish, and red is more brown.

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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by Akodo Makama »

Trichromatic vision depends on three receptors*. One is more sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum. The others, more sensitive toward the red end. The so-called 'green' receptor is actually almost identical to the red one. Both of those are most sensitive in the yellow-orange region of the spectrum. So if one doesn't work right (as in RG colorblindness), the other still receives most of the information. It just can't tell the difference between the two.

So, blue is almost untouched. Red and green mostly get mushed together into a single color. Yellow works decently at representing this to trichromatic people. The picture I posted isn't perfect. The pure green and red transformed buttons should have been brighter, with a bit more yellow in each, but it gives a decent representation of which colors are hard to tell apart.

*Just to confuse this further, there are actually two or three different types of the Red receptor (not counting the non-functional ones found in RG colorblind people). The encoding for that receptor's pigment is found on the X chromosome, so any given male can only have one type. But women can have two, so they can distinguish between colors that don't even exist for men. So when your girlfriend/wife tells you two colors don't match, just accept that she's right.

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Azhrei
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by Azhrei »

Akodo Makama wrote:So when your girlfriend/wife tells you two colors don't match, just accept that she's right.
LOL! I already do, my friend, I already do!!

Nice to know there's a scientific reason behind it, though. :)

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DrVesuvius
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by DrVesuvius »

I'm red-green colourblind, have absolutely no problem distinguishing between the red and green buttons, and the first two sets of images do *not* look the same to me. (Skester, were you joking when you said they looked the same, or is your colour-blindness much more severe than mine?)

The biggest problem I have is with very pale or very dark reds & greens (and by extension browns, which they both tend to blur into). That's only ever had a real-world impact in two cases - red and green pens on an overhead projector, and red and green indicator LEDS (the insistance on computer manufacturers using multi-colour LEDs to indicate system failures has been a particular bane of my professional life). In each case I can eventually get the difference by looking very closely. But high saturation shades of the colours like the MapTool buttons are never a problem.

The only other case where I'd say I'd have a problem would be if someone used green text on a red background, or vice versa. I don't know how that looks for people with normal colour vision, but on the rare occasion I've seen it I've found it difficult to the point of painful to read. (I've just tried it with a Maptool button - Green text on Red is a lot harder to read, Red text on green is marginally less so)

I don't think it would be worth the effort to code in a special colour-blind mode, especially since what would work for red-green colour-blindness might not work for the less common blue-yellow version (and as far as I know, the complete "greyscale" colour blindness is very rare) but maybe just using a different font colour between the questionable colours would be enough. For example, when I use a red button I find white text makes it easier to read, and in the case of someone who really can't tell red from green, would distinguish those buttons.

Just my personal experience, YMMV.

Dr V

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JonathanTheBlack
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by JonathanTheBlack »

DrV, by color-blind mode... I mean extra text descriptions that remain hidden unless cb.mode is activated. For example...

w/o CBMode: Mage's Fireball (Arcane, Standard Action * Ranged Burst 10, Implement, Fire)
w/CBMode: Mage's Fireball (Arcane, Standard Action, Encounter * Ranged Burst 10, Implement, Fire)

The background behind that line of text would be dark red in my framework. That tells people who aren't color-blind that it's an encounter power. I like to use visual clues as much as possible to limit clutter and lots of text.

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skester
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by skester »

Dr V, mine seems a bit worse than yours.

With regards to the red/green, the further away from each other they are the more difficult I have telling them apart. Put them right next to each other and I can sometimes figure out the colour, not always.

I do have the problem more with darker colours than lighter ones. Though Pink (looks either grey for light pink or red for dark) and Purple (blue) I insist are imaginary made up colours. Orange, well there's only one shade of Orange no matter what you tell me.

It's really wierd for me and hard to explain at times. For example, on this page I see Font colour to the right (hey, it's spelt correctly).
fontcolour.png
fontcolour.png (1014 Bytes) Viewed 28483 times
Take the top row. 3rd column. when I compare it to the 4th column, I can't tell the difference. However when I compare it to the 5th column, I can. BUT at the same time the 4th and 5th columns look the same to me. I can only tell the difference from the 3rd and 5th (barely, I actually have to put one on the other and go "oh it's lighter").

And 2nd row, 3rd, 4th and 5th look the same as the 1st row, 3rd, 4th and 5th. I'm looking at the picture at 800% right now trying to tell the difference.

Going down,Row 3, columns 4 and 5 look the same as each other, and very close to the ones above them. Row 4, column 1 and 2 look the same as each other (and I have no idea what colour it is truthfully). And Row 5 columns 1 and 2 look the same as each other. And this is zoomed in to 800% so it's easier. Leave it small and there's even less distinction.

It's extrememly confusing and frustrating. But at least I can tell the difference between red and green traffic lights (the green looks whitish while the red is definitely red).

That is why I borrowed my macro colour scheme off of one of the posts. Thought it looked good.

Skester

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aliasmask
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by aliasmask »

There are some optical illusions(?) that demonstrate when looking at one color for an extended time then to another, that the color is actually different that what you've seen before. I think it has something to do with filling your color cones of one color and when combined when looking at a new color can make it distorted. Also there is "color adaption" when you adjust a color by the surrounding colors.

Here's an awesome example: http://www.colorcube.com/illusions/chrmadptb.htm
Last edited by aliasmask on Sat Oct 16, 2010 4:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

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skester
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Re: Scripting/planning ahead for colorblind gamers...

Post by skester »

Yellow shirt? Green Shirt? I saw Red. lol

Skester

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