Tim Tan Huynh [UX]

Visually impaired gamers

  • 14 Dec 2020
  • For a course project, I did user-research involving visually impaired players. My goal was to glean insights from their described experiences and compile recommendations for game studios to make their games more accessible.

Table of Contents

  1. Topic
  2. Context
    1. Background knowledge
    2. Prior experience
  3. Process
    1. Four weeks, five threads
  4. Findings
    1. Vision impairments
    2. Perception issues
    3. Gaming issues
    4. Use-cases / strategies
    5. Existing technical solutions
    6. Negative outcomes
  5. Recommendations
  6. Caveats
    1. Advice
    2. Acknowledgements
  7. Justification
    1. Fear The Stick
    2. Love The Carrot
  8. Appendix

1. Topic

I had a couple of guiding questions throughout my research.

  1. For visually impaired players, what are their gaming experiences?
    • Barriers
    • Use-cases / strategies
    • Examples (good & bad)
  2. What are (or would be) useful solutions?

2. Context

2.1. Background knowledge

I already had useful knowledge about this topic.

  1. Work experience with web accessibility
  2. Foundational courses in related fields
    • Cognitive psychology (sensation & perception)
    • Computer science (software programming)
  3. Research for inclusive-design course (Nintendo Switch)

2.2. Prior experience

I used my lived experiences to connect with this group of people.

  • Long-time gamer (PlayStation, previously Xbox and Nintendo systems)
  • Long-time GameFAQs user
  • Very nearsighted, always wear glasses

3. Process

3.1. Four weeks, five threads

I invited stories from visually impaired players on GameFAQs and conversed with them.

  1. Created GameFAQs thread
  2. Facilitated conversations (follow-up questions, specific responses, possible solutions)
  3. Created additional GameFAQs threads
  4. Coded comments of varying depth (~50 total users)
  5. Consolidated themes

4. Findings

4.1. Vision impairments

People had different types and severities of impairments. Some had multiple impairments.

  • Nearsightedness, astigmatism (blurred vision)
  • Colour-blindness
  • Blind eye, lazy eye
  • Tunnel vision
  • Involuntary eye-muscle movement
  • Floaters
  • Motion sickness, other visual-neural disconnect

4.2. Perception issues

These impairments result in issues involving various aspects of vision.

  • Details, sharpness
  • Colours
  • Depth
  • Motion
  • Central vision, focus
  • Peripheral vision

4.3. Gaming issues

People discussed common, and often overlapping, tasks that were sometimes difficult for them. Difficulties with these essential tasks can affect their success, enjoyment, and even participation.

  • Reading text
  • Understanding non-textual info
  • Navigating worlds
  • Distinguishing characters, objects
  • Noticing changes
  • Perceiving complex stimuli
  • Moving in 3D worlds

4.4 Use-cases / strategies

People described their preferred ways of gaming. They aren’t a uniform group; they have different and, in some cases, opposite preferences.

  • Wear corrective lenses (16), avoids wearing glasses (3)
  • Prefer larger screen (7), prefer smaller screen (5)
  • Prefer closer distance (5), prefer farther distance (3)
  • Avoid or favour certain genres (6)
  • Use system feature (screen zoom) (2)
  • Disable system feature (3D effect) (2)

4.5. Existing technical solutions

People mentioned some after-the-fact features and modes that were somewhat useful, if not perfect.

  • Zoom/magnification features are limited

    • Ni No Kuni II is a pain to read for me because even the regular dialog text is microscopic and zooming in for every line of dialog is a pain. P18

    • The zoom feature helps, but slows things down, and needless to say, can only realistically be used in menus. P21

  • Zoom/magnification features are not obvious

    • My main gripe with the switch is the font size in menus and textboxes. I just wish there was a way of making it bigger in handheld mode. P23

    • Sometimes I wish there was a quick magnifying glass that I could bring up on the screen with the touch of the button […]. Maybe there already is and I just don’t know about it. P37

  • Colourblind modes are ‘hit’ or ‘miss’

    • The games I’ve played with the high level option to filter by color blindness have been fine. I haven’t personally needed further customization. P13

    • I am very colour blind a lot of new games have filters to supposedly help but I find it don’t in some cases.P39

  • Filter-like modes might not suit everyone in local (shared-screen) multi-player situations

4.6. Negative outcomes

People mentioned negative outcomes in terms of emotional or mental states and, unexpectedly, physical states. They also alluded to negative outcomes that, while not distressing to them, affected their cognitive and social states and could be more severe to other people in similar cases. I hadn’t considered the possibility of sequences of barriers.

  1. Confusion

    • I often don’t see things if they blend into the background in games like RPGs unless I bump into them. I could be wandering around for hours trying to find something and I could have walked past it hundreds of times. P6

  2. Frustration

    • One of the reasons I gave up on Cuphead was because I simply couldn’t see everything going on, to me it’s like I’m dying to invisible obstacles. P18

  3. Anger

    • Color-based mechanics piss me off because of my color-blindness. P24

  4. Discomfort

    • There are tons of games with small font that make it pretty much unplayable for me. I try but the strain gives me low key vertigo. P40

  5. Pain

    • It didn’t matter how hard I tried to look at one part of the screen or anything. A few minutes in and my head would be killing me and my eyes would be hurting so badly. P15

  6. Potential damage

    • Another thing I haven’t mentioned is VR, as I haven’t actually tried it yet due to my optician telling me it may harm my eyes more. P6

  7. Cognitive burden

    • I can’t see the whole Switch screen or a 3DS screen at one time, either, or most T.B. screens these days. For some 3DS games, like Kid Icarus: Uprising, I just memorized the bottom screen. P6

  8. Social exclusion

    • I’m also not able to play most first person games without getting severe motion sickness. P40

  9. Domino Effects

    • Had to actually look up where the last spot I was missing was, too since I eventually gave up after a few days of searching. P6 [What if this person had encountered additional barriers while trying to solve this problem?]

5. Recommendations

The following recommended features are based on people’s comments as well as my experience with gaming. Most of these features already exist in games, though not all games, because they’re not necessarily intended for people who have visual impairments. However, visually impaired and non-impaired players alike can benefit from them.

  1. Distinct, non-color visual attributes
  2. Large size* for text

    • I play games on a 55 inch TV and […] there is still text that I have to squint to see in some menus, and I don’t think sitting closer to the TV like I did when I was seven is the solution. P37

  3. Large size* for HUDs

    • There was on screen text I couldn’t read or minimap icons I couldn’t distinguish from each other without getting off the sofa and getting closer to the TV. P43

  4. Control of any advanced VFX (3D, motion blur, head bobbing, flashing lights)

    • Any ideas why some games cause motion sickness and how to change this? P29

  5. HUD in pause mode

    • [HUDs] don’t tend to be in my view anyway. I prefer to have everything in a Pause Menu so I can take time to look at things. P6

  6. Brightness/contrast settings

    • Not sure if other games had colour settings in them, other than brightness and contrast settings, which to be fair, are actually surprisingly useful anyway. P6

  7. Support for established (lower) resolutions

    • Maybe [bad eyesight is] why I don’t care about games going 4k or even 1080 on handheld. 720 portable is just fine with me with consistent framerate. P8

  8. Aim/tracking assist

    • Vault assisted targeting is a huge help for me. And so is aim assist in general. P14

  9. Safe area/zone settings
  10. Readable diegetic (in-universe) text
  11. Specific colour options

    • Changing the colour schemes of items, backgrounds, and even things like icons on maps or radars would be really beneficial. P6

  12. Highlight effects for objects (characters, items)

    • Sometimes I have trouble tracking teammates in games. […] A game that handles this very well is Left 4 Dead. Teammates have a bright outline around them at all times if they’re not in your [character’s] field of vision. P38

  13. Highlight effects for movement

    • I can’t see 3D or depth either, as I only use one eye. I’m really glad when games have shadows below the character to see where roughly I am going to be landing. P6

  14. Progression indicators/trackers

    • I didn’t even know it didn’t keep track of treasure chests outside of dungeons until I looked it up so I was wandering aimlessly for hours searching in the field, too. P6

  15. Difficulty adjustments

    • I play the game well enough, but if I’m dying to stuff I simply do not see, due to my severe visual impairment and very limited field of view, [an] easy mode that adds extra lives and maybe some healing items here and there would help mitigate the disadvantage I have with my poor vision. P18

* A suitably “large size” for text and HUDs need to be determined (see following section).

6. Caveats

6.1. Advice

If pursuing user research and/or game-development involving visually impaired people, be mindful of some tasks and purposes:

  1. For text / HUDs, test with various resolutions, distances
  2. Test those who have various impairment types, severities
  3. Remember the adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”
  4. Expect your conceptions to be broken and re-built

6.2. Acknowledgements

I should acknowledge some facts to clarify the information that I’ve presented:

  1. Not all settings can help all players
    • Zoom/magnification might not help someone who has tunnel vision, for example
  2. Not all barriers come from poor design
  3. People are responsible for their health
  4. Many people in this study are accustomed to their impairments
  5. Recruiting impaired people for testing can be difficult
  6. Console games differ from computer software
    • For consoles, system software and game software exist parallel to each other
  7. I am not a game developer

7. Justification

There are both negative and positive incentives to accommodating people who have visual impairments or any type of impairment.

7.1. Fear The Stick

  1. Be notable for the wrong reasons

    • Cyberpunk 2077 to add new epilepsy warning as devs work on a permanent fix The Verge

  2. Get left behind by the gaming-accessibility movement

    • I am fairly confident that at least the big name developers will give people like me more options to enjoy their games. We’ve already seen some take this road. P40

  3. Lose customers and/or supporters

    • I’m super bummed about [having severe motion sickness] because CP2077 is around the corner. I’ll give it a shot but just watching the trailers has gotten me woozy. P40

7.2. Love The Carrot

  1. Be notable for the right reasons

    • Tell you this, the best features for visually impaired people these days can be found in The Last of Us 2 and newer Ubisoft games. P14

    • I am not visually impaired, but the work that the Coalition did with Gears [of War] 5 got a lot of praise for its subtitle and visual impairment accessibility. P45

  2. Surprise people in good ways (especially if not a huge company)

    • I feel like only the huge developer like an EA really go extra effort to make sure the already confusing HUD’s are made easier for colour blind people to make out. P39

  3. Win customers and/or supporters

    • I was really glad to see that [recent addition of high-contrast mode], personally, since the color Picross mode was always something that concerned me about getting those games (since I’m red-green colorblind.) P26

    • Thanks for drawing my attention to this topic P18

    • First off, thank you for [making] this topic. I appreciate someone raising our issues. P23

    • I actually really appreciate this post because, like I said before, I do think there is a larger effort being put toward accessibility issues. P40

    • Thanks man. I’ve never been able to explain to people (friends/other gamers) the limitations I have due to my vision issues. I’m super down to assist you in your cause. P23

Appendix

  1. Open Codes of data
  2. Code Book of data