When you want to convey information visually, in a quick and simple manner, it’s no secret that colour-coding can be very effective. But if you aren’t colour-blind yourself, it can be easy to forget that not everyone sees different colours in the same way. I actually am slightly colour-blind, but only mildly, so I completely forget about it most of the time!
Up until now in my games, I’d never thought about specifically catering for colour-blind players – but my graphics had all been distinct in shape as well as colour, so I got away with it. In my latest game however, there were some graphics (mice, cats, etc.) that differed only in their colour – and their colour was a core part of the puzzles! As some of you rightly pointed out: that needed fixing.
So I’ve been busy! Luckily I had already been using blue and red as the most common colours, meaning many people with red-green or blue-yellow colour-blindness (the two most common varieties) may have no problem with the graphics. For those who do though, I’ve just updated the Miriam’s Mice Beta to version 0.51, which includes a new Colour-Blind mode. This adds high contrast borders and patterns of vertical or horizontal lines to the shapes so that they can be distinguished even by somebody with complete Achromatopsia (the impressive sounding name for rare total colour-blindness). It may not be perfect, but it should help!
(As an aside, it’s frighteningly easy to lose yourself in researching the different varieties of colour-blindness, their occurrence rates, and how precisely they affect vision. Not to mention the fascination of playing around with LMS colour-space filters to try to simulate how colour-blind people perceive different colours. Don’t start investigating unless you have a free evening/night/day/week/year/lifetime ahead of you!)
Thanks to those who pointed this out, and to Andrey for your helpful suggestions. I’m still just one guy, with limited experience, so do please let me know if I make more dumb accessibility oversights in the future!