bad colours for incomings

[virogenesis]

Today I have been designing a accessabilty friendly site....... anyone it has just occurred to me how badly the colurs for friendly ships & hostile ships are.
Why i say this, 1 in 12 men suffer from colour blindness & 1 in 200 women also suffer.
3 types of colour blindness exist two of which are to do with green & red.
Which must mean quite a few players are handicapped whist playing below as a check i ran on a parser as you can see yes you can see the difference but it is quite hard.
http://vischeck.homeip.net/uploads/10845068738911

[Helix]

Vir :: I thought the types of color blindness were red/orange (cant tell the difference between red and orange) and blue/green (cant tell the difference between blue and green)

I dont recall there being anything where you cant tell the difference between red and green

[virogenesis]

There are many types of partial color-blindness, the most frequent being red-green. Other forms of color blindness are much much rarer, like blue-yellow, and the rarest being complete color blindess (achromatopsia, or maskun), where one can see only shades of grey.

Types of red-green color blindness:

* Deuteranopia: lacking the green receptor cones in the retina; those affected are unable to distinguish between red and green. This is the most common form of color blindness, also known as Daltonism after Dalton. (Dalton's diagnosis was confirmed as deuteranopia in 1995, some 150 years after his death, by DNA analysis of his preserved eyeball.)
* Protanopia: lacking the retinal cones that detect red light, rendering those with this condition unable to see red.

[AzureWrath]

nice for the colo(u)r blind i guess

I dont recall there being anything where you cant tell the difference between red and green

I thought red/green color blindness was the most well-known?

Edit: doh, didnt read Vir's last post :<

[Stealth]

Speaking of color, they should change MoC back to Pink. As much as I hate pink, it's better than that purplish crap they have now.

[Helix]

naw, dont change it back to pink, make it a randomly generated color from one of the 18 shades of white they have in PA

[Sevrok]

i think that the colours are fine, may be the incoming oculd be divided into ships defending and ships attacking though as it would solve some accessability problems for players who suffer from colour blindness, plus if as a gaming comunity we are seen to be considering such things as accessibilty for handicaped players the number of players may increase! I also think the ability to chose to hvae large print text could be usefull for any partially sighted players, say as an option in the preferance screen, i dont know how much work the programing would take, but in the long run minor changes which make the game more accessable to more people should increase player numbers and thus increase the flow and dynamics of the game!

[mist]

i thought there were + and - signs next to things, so that parsers could tell?

or did that go out the window with pax?

-mist

[Razorback]

you can change the size of text normally in your browser and the whole green and red debate is pretty senseless. You will find no color fitting better or beeing liked by everyone.
On an additional thought, they dont customize trafficlights for handicapped either and the attackers/defenders list gives you a good overview of incomings aswell (unless attacker is xan).
Also the question is do those statistics apply for the pa playerbase ? Considering you grabbed a statistic which was not created from this community i doubt it and it would be quiet dubious to transfer another statistic onto pa and take it as a god given fact.

[virogenesis]

Originally Posted by Razorback

you can change the size of text normally in your browser and the whole green and red debate is pretty senseless. You will find no color fitting better or beeing liked by everyone.
On an additional thought, they dont customize trafficlights for handicapped either and the attackers/defenders list gives you a good overview of incomings aswell (unless attacker is xan).
Also the question is do those statistics apply for the pa playerbase ? Considering you grabbed a statistic which was not created from this community i doubt it and it would be quiet dubious to transfer another statistic onto pa and take it as a god given fact.

1. Traffic lights, aren't a problem as it's easy to learn the sequence even if you can't distinguish the colours.
2. Those stats will be incorrect for pa but not for life.
Their must be someone who plays pa & suffers from some sort of colour blind issues to say their ain't any in pa would be quite crazy as we both know this isn't the case.
3. incoming is pretty rubblish you try picking up on whats green & whats red.
4. It wouldn't be hard to make different stylesheets for incoming\outgoing giving the user (player) a choice of colours or what have ya.

[virogenesis]

Originally Posted by mist

i thought there were + and - signs next to things, so that parsers could tell?

or did that go out the window with pax?

-mist

Can't remember haven't been attacked in ages

[Razorback]

so youre telling me, valueable designtime and codingtime should be diverted from the mainsubject, the game to areas which might only support 5% of the playerbase or even less ? (you didnt represent us any stats on how many players actually suffer so for all we care it might not be fitting one person at all).

Whats next ? PA for blind ppl ? where every menu point has a voice function ?
Get real, focus on the game for the masses, if thats on the road and a success you can work on the minorities.
As sad as it may sound i would rather have a good game for 95% of the players then cater 5% special needs and have a crap game for the rest. Cause afterall in the first case maybe 5% might have difficulties or not enjoy it but in the last case 100% wont enjoy the game.

[virogenesis]

razorback you make it sounds like a big change surely they have designers & coders....
How am I meant to know how many suffer pa hasn't ever done market research on the subject but in my class at college out of a class of 18 i know 2 people who suffer from colour blindness my mate..... & my tutor....
both can't tell the colours apart from each other .

[Razorback]

thats a drama m8 but completely unimportant to an online multiplayer browser game.

As much as i envy you for your deep thoughts and interesting courseworks pa's coders should spend any minute they have to make the core of the game as good as possible. This excludes wasting any second or breath on unimportant and minority stuff. Afterall this is a product they want to sell and they need to sell it to the majority not to a small group of handicapped ppl.

[mist]

Originally Posted by Razorback

they need to sell it to the majority not to a small group of handicapped ppl.

iirc, that kind of thinking is illegal under uk law. something about the disabled being able to access websites? completely different legal code, but didn't the sydney olympics lot get in to trouble for having a flash site with no html equivelant, hence being completely inaccessable to screen readers?

-mist

[Banned]

Originally Posted by Razorback

Whats next ? PA for blind ppl ?

Apparantly they have this already. Specially formatted page for the customized browsers or something like that.

[Tactitus]

Originally Posted by Banned

Apparantly they have this already. Specially formatted page for the customized browsers or something like that.

They used to. Dunno if it survived the rewrite(s).

[Epcylon]

Implementing this should be as easy as making a copy of a stylesheet, changing some colours, and presenting it as an option in preferences, along with all the other skins. Grand total of 2 minutes work or so? (I'm ofc assuming they've used good coding techniques when developing the pages, so I might be very wrong )

And a funny thing about statistics. If you have a statistic that tells you that out of the whole population, x% has some condition, and you then pick randomly 1000 people from the whole population, then you can be pretty certain that there will be x*10 people of those selected, give or take a few, who have that condition. Colourblindness isn't something that will severly change attitudes towards computers and online games (I think), so we can assume that the PA community is a pretty good cross-section of the population at large, atleast when it comes to colourblindness. This in turn leads us to conclude that there probably are quite a few who suffer from colourblindness in varying degree, and who are playing PA.

[MrL_JaKiri]

Originally Posted by Epcylon

then you can be pretty certain that there will be x*10 people of those selected, give or take a few, who have that condition

Sort of, but that doesn't apply here because it's a biased sample.

[Leshy]

Originally Posted by Razorback

This excludes wasting any second or breath on unimportant and minority stuff. Afterall this is a product they want to sell and they need to sell it to the majority not to a small group of handicapped ppl.

Several countries, including the UK and US are already demanding websites to be available to visually impaired people. I would say that discriminating against people with poor eyesight or another visual condition is hardly an unimportant or minority matter. Regardless, this sort of thing does not require any game coding or whatever. All that this should need, is one or two unique stylesheets using high contrast colours, which is piss easy and which could be done by people not in PA Team.

Originally Posted by Razorback

Whats next ? PA for blind ppl ? where every menu point has a voice function ?

Easy enough with an aural stylesheet.

Originally Posted by Epcylon

(I'm ofc assuming they've used good coding techniques when developing the pages, so I might be very wrong )

<font color=red>3000 INCOMING HOSTILES</font>

'nuff said.

I have been assured that Planetarion v3 (eg. Round 12) should improve greatly upon CSS customizeability. However, considering Karmulian has some sort of zealous dedication to supporting Netscape 4.x, I won't hold my breath for an XHTML/CSS layout - very likely we'll still be looking at a rigid table-based layout that doesn't even comply with HTML 4.01 standards.

A real shame, considering a layer-based layout would allow for much more flexibility in style design, whereby not only graphics and colours could be changed, but the whole layout of the page itself as well. Unfortunately, this will likely remain a dream.

Edit: Actually, it would be easy enough to 'fix' these colours using a custom stylesheet (even with the above coding!) - unfortunately only Opera allows you to use your own stylesheets without requiring any coding on the server itself. Additionally, MSIE doesn't support the required CSS selectors for changing these colours.