Video games have a color accessibility problem but that’s changing

Almost 15 years ago, the way I looked at the world changed. Literally.

I was playing Peggle, a popular puzzle video game about shooting balls at colored pegs when I realized I had a problem: The green and orange pegs looked almost identical to me.

After a bit of online research, some soul-searching, and a visit to the eye clinic, I was diagnosed with moderate red-green colorblindness. Suddenly, my eyes were opened to how games handled colorblind accessibility. Video games are by far the most common reminder of my different color vision in daily life — it just doesn’t come up that often outside of gaming.

Since then, I’ve always checked to see if a game has decent accessibility options. Peggle has stuck with me because it has an option to put icons on the pegs, negating the need to see the colors at all. But that’s not always the case. Sure, gaming has made plenty of strides over the years to help people like me, but some common problems persist even today. Whether you know it or not, color can still be an exclusionary barrier to enjoying video games.

Don’t ask what colors I can see, please

Over the years, I’ve come to a startling realization about my own condition: A lot of folks just plain don’t understand what colorblindness entails. Given that there are an estimated 300 million colorblind people (per a 2019 estimate by the colorblind assistance company Enchroma) in a world of nearly 8 billion, that’s understandable, I suppose. You might go years without meeting a colorblind person, and since you can only see through your own eyes, you can’t even tell unless they mention it.

With that being the case, I’m going to do my best to clear up what colorblindness is and what it is not. The simplest explanation is that colorblindness makes it difficult (but usually not impossible) to distinguish certain colors. According to the National Eye Institute, a government agency dedicated to vision research, the most common struggle is telling the difference between green and red. There’s also a less common type that makes it tough to tell blue from green and yellow from red. And after that, there’s a very rare variant that negates color vision entirely called monochromacy. Per a study published by the National Library of Medicine, monochromacy affects about 1 in 30,000 people.

A colorblind comparison for ‘Lumines,’ courtesy of Enchroma.
Credit: Enchroma / Enhance

Even within those categories, there are several sub-types of colorblindness to consider. For example, deuteranomaly (the most common form of red/green colorblindness) makes green look more red, protanomaly makes red look more green, and protanopia makes it impossible to distinguish the two colors at all.

This isn’t just a matter of fire trucks and football fields looking the wrong color, either. Any color that features hints of those problem colors can be affected. Sometimes I have trouble telling blue and purple apart because the only thing separating the two is that purple contains traces of red. I can only speak for myself as no two people’s eyes are the same, but certain shades of red, green, brown, and orange tend to give me the most trouble.

The best way to improve color accessibility is to make color not matter at all.

I understand that this is confusing to those of you with normal color vision, but someone being colorblind doesn’t typically make them blind to all colors. The world doesn’t look like an episode of The Andy Griffith Show to most of us.

All I ask is that you understand that colorblindness generally means colors look different to us, not that colors don’t exist. And if a friend tells you they’re colorblind, please do not point at things and ask them what colors they see. It’s extraordinarily obnoxious.

No more color-coded puzzles

The fact that there are so many different varieties of colorblindness means there are just as many different experiences that colorblind players can have. For some, like me, it doesn’t get in the way that often. For others, it’s a serious, reoccurring hindrance.

A few major examples stand out from my time playing video games. I deeply adore The Witcher 3, even going as far as to call it one of my top 10 favorite games ever. However, it commits the cardinal sin of forcing the player to use “Witcher Senses,” a mode that drowns out some of the world’s color and highlights objects of interest (like clues, footprints, and scents to follow) in red. Most of that game takes place in environments that are some shade of either green or brown, so this frequently became a problem for me.

That should give you a basic idea of how ordinary game design sometimes bumps up against color vision problems, but The Witcher 3’s problem is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. You’re almost never asked to use Witcher Senses under duress.

Unfortunately, Paper Mario: The Origami King’s final boss fight includes a time-sensitive puzzle that puts colorblind players under pressure to figure things out quickly, or fail.

Starting at around the five-minute mark in the video, you’ll see that the final obstacle before the end credits in Origami King is a big color-matching puzzle with a short time limit. With no time pressure, this wouldn’t be a big deal as you can brute force your way to the solution by looking at the pictures. With time pressure, however, this becomes incredibly frustrating for colorblind players like me, as the reds, greens, and yellows of the image don’t quite contrast hard enough to be distinct.

In talking to a handful of other colorblind gamers, I realized that I have it relatively easy. Those examples I just gave are outliers; I play a lot of video games and usually don’t run into seriously debilitating color roadblocks. Some folks, however, have to be careful with entire game genres like shooters and puzzle games because of the way they perceive color.

One such person is Dan McCloskey, a colorblind and legally blind player who reached out to me via Twitter. He is diagnosed as having very few of the red-sensing cones (the cells in our eyes that let us perceive color) which make up 60 percent of the total cones in our eyes, per the American Academy of Ophthalmology. McCloskey told me that shooters, specifically the multiplayer modes that make them so popular, are almost totally a no-go for him, as popular shooters like Overwatch often use red icons or outlines to mark opposing players by default.

How ‘Fortnite’ might look to a colorblind player, courtesy of Enchroma.
Credit: Enchroma / Epic Games

“My general experience with [shooters] is I can enjoy the single-player campaigns and probably just will never have the contrast recognition to be good enough at the multiplayer to make it worth my while,” McCloskey said. “By the time I realize that the enemy is the enemy, they have seen me and shot me already.”

Multiplayer shooters came up a lot in the conversations I had with colorblind gamers. So did puzzle games like Lumines and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, as they frequently make color matching a core part of their gameplay.

Sometimes, it’s the games you love the most that hurt the hardest. Puzzle Fighter is a delight, but I can’t tell the difference between the green and yellow blocks you have to separate, so I never got very good at it. McCloskey and Matthew Brown, a longtime Twitter homie of mine and a fellow colorblind gamer, both also cited Lumines as an awesome game they couldn’t play because of its color requirements.

Sticking with that theme, Brown sadly pointed a finger at Ace Combat 7, a game he and I both deeply love and appreciate. It’s a game about dramatic, exciting dogfights with goofy stories and incredible music. Unfortunately for Brown, a lifelong fan of the series, important user interface (UI) elements like the missile lock-on indicator, the speedometer, and the altimeter (most of which are either red or orange) don’t stand out enough against the action for him. Since there are some missions that ask the player to maintain certain speeds or altitudes, that’s a big problem.

Another colorblindness conversion for ‘Ace Combat 7,’ courtesy of Enchroma.
Credit: Enchroma / Bandai Namco

“[Ace Combat 7 is] a great game. It’s a lot of fun… it’s a return to what I loved about the series growing up,” Brown said. “But [the color problem] is a definite ding on it. It didn’t totally push me away but it really, really, really impacted my ability to enjoy it as much as I would’ve liked.”

Ace Combat 7 is a bummer because it was released in 2019 and doesn’t have much in the way of accessibility options for colorblind players. You can change enemy target markers from red to blue, yellow, or green, but those other heads-up display (HUD) elements Brown cited are static. However, plenty of games in recent years have made great advances in accommodating folks like us who need a bit of help seeing colors correctly.

Colorblind options can help non-colorblind gamers, too

The good news is that colorblind gamers aren’t totally on their own. With each passing year, more games have been including more kinds of accessibility options to help people who don’t see color the way most of the population does, for better and worse.

Some games like Battlefield and Halo Infinite let players adjust the colors of interface elements like map icons. By default, enemies might be red and squad mates might be orange or yellow, which is no bueno for lots of colorblind players. Letting us switch those colors out manually is a big help. Nintendo’s color-based shooter Splatoon, which tasks two teams with painting a map with their respective color of squid ink, also has a nice “color lock” option to ensure that problem colors will never be chosen for your team or the opponent’s.

Some games go beyond that, allowing players to alter the game’s color palette completely. Fortnite has a few modes for common types of colorblindness (like deuteranopia and protanopia), which change everything from weapon rarity icons to the color of grass. You adjust the intensity for each mode on a 10-point scale, which in turn makes colors contrast with each other even harder. The options menu actually includes simple colorblind tests to best sort out which mode to use, too.

‘Fortnite’ has a nice suite of colorblind options couched in helpful menus.
Credit: Screenshot: Epic Games

It’s great! So great, in fact, that non-colorblind competitive players actually use it to see their prey on the battlefield more easily. Everybody wins.

Almost everyone, anyway. Merely switching up colors won’t help every colorblind player. The best way to improve color accessibility is to make color not matter at all through what AbleGamers, a non-profit that conducts accessibility research and has impacted accessibility options in games like World of Warcraft, calls a “second channel.” That’s when a game communicates vital information in more than one way, like putting icons on colored objects so color isn’t the only thing differentiating them. In real-life terms, think about how a stop sign isn’t just red. It also says “STOP” and is octagonal in shape, giving you a total of three different channels to know immediately that it’s a stop sign.

It’s still pretty common for games to not have colorblind options at all, as is true with accessibility modes for all other disabilities.

AbleGamers senior director Steve Spohn isn’t colorblind, but feedback he’s heard from colorblind gamers over the years has emphasized the need for these second channels.

“Every complaint that I’ve ever heard from people who are colorblind says: ‘I don’t give a crap that I can’t see red on the screen. I’m used to living life that way. All I need to know is that that’s a bad guy and I need to kill the bad guys,’” Spohn said. “They spend so much time worrying about the color red, but there’s other ways to do it.”

Even with all the examples we have of effective colorblind modes and the advocacy of organizations like AbleGamers, there are still plenty of games that get it wrong. The 2016 Doom remake had a few colorblind options that just slapped unattractive filters over the gameplay, which altered the game’s color palette in a way that just made the world look washed out and drab, without really helping much. And, of course, it’s still pretty common for games to not have colorblind options at all, as is true with accessibility modes for all other disabilities.

Rather than ascribing willful neglect to developers of these games, Spohn acknowledged that the breadth of the human experience means that sometimes these issues just don’t come up as often as they should.

“I think the real reason why you don’t see these options in games for the most part is because the developer just doesn’t think about it,” Spohn said. “They don’t have a loved one in their life who is disabled…or they don’t have a person who is disabled enough to need accommodations.”

Gaming’s biggest names are paying attention

That’s why it’s important for disability advocates to have their voices heard, and for big gaming companies to take steps to make sure those conversations come up during game development. Thankfully, that does seem to be happening at places like PlayStation and Xbox these days. PlayStation has a webpage dedicated to explaining accessibility features in its recent games, pointing out that nothing important in Returnal is dependent on color and that Horizon: Forbidden West uses different shapes and icons in addition to color-coding.

Xbox has also made big strides in recent years. The Xbox Adaptive Controller made a big splash when it launched a few years ago, giving gamers with disabilities effective ways to play their favorite games, though at a heavy financial cost of $100 for the controller and potentially hundreds more for accessories, as pointed out by gaming disability site Can I Play That. Games in the Xbox digital store come with accessibility tags so you know if they have colorblind modes before you buy, and the Xbox Accessibility Insider League program gives players a mechanism to provide accessibility feedback to developers.

Anita Mortaloni, director of accessibility for Xbox, noted the importance of direct feedback from players in shaping all of these features.

“[Developers] don’t have the lived experience of all the people that are going to play their game, and it’s not until you put a game out there…that you realize and get the feedback that there are barriers to play,” Mortaloni said. “The more we listen to the community on that and get that feedback to all the engineers and creators and producers…that’s where we get to adapt and evolve, and continue to move forward on the accessibility journey.”

PlayStation 5’s color filters menu.
Credit: Screenshot: PlayStation

One interesting method Xbox and PlayStation both use to potentially work around games that don’t have built-in colorblind modes are system-wide color filters. It’s like what Fortnite does, but for your whole Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5. You can choose the colorblindness variant that’s right for you and manually adjust intensity until all relevant colors look distinct enough to your eyes. This will apply to anything you use the console for after you enable it in the accessibility portion of each respective console’s settings menu.

It’s not the same as developers accounting for colorblindness when making their games, but it’s a nice idea that could surely help some folks out there. Ultimately, the more developers take disabilities like colorblindness under consideration from the start of development, the better the accessibility features will be.

“Many times you can tell it’s like, ‘Thanks for having that, but I can tell you added it at the end,’” Mortaloni said. “One of the things we encourage the most is [to] start it way at the beginning, get the feedback, iterate, and partner with the community to see how it works…so it feels genuinely integrated into the game.”