Color Blindness

M

Mashun

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• Sep 24, 2011

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• #1

I'm not sure if this has been brought up before, but I'm a color blind gamer whose been been playing Victoria 2 and HoI3 recently. In these games when I go to look at the conditions/modifiers in the tooltips that accompany, well pretty much everything in these games, I have a devil of a time figuring out if it's a little red asterisk or a little green asterisk next to whatever modifier I'm looking at.

Will CK2 do anything to make this next game easier for color blind people? I'm thinking it would be really nice if it was at least a green asterisk vs. a red "X" or something.

Thanks!

 

Ephafn

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• Sep 25, 2011

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• #2

So I'm not the only one?

I'm also colorblind, and I also have trouble with Victoria 2 and EU3W red/green asterisks. I think a big part of the problem is the translucent background, although replacing the asterisks by thicker symbols (like a big dot) would definitely help me.

 

Last edited: Sep 25, 2011

unmerged(303218)

Colonel

Apr 17, 2011

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• Sep 25, 2011

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• #3

It's a real problem red and green (chiefly used to denote yes and no) have quite the same lightness.

Perhaps if green was a tick, and red an X, you won' have any problems.
However, unless CK2 has been developed from the start with this in mind, I doubt so late such an addition would be made.

BtW, what can you make of the maps? Most of the information is represented by colours, in most mapmodes. Especially HoI3 maps have the same lightness all over.

 

King of Men

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• Sep 25, 2011

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• #4

Perhaps the asterisks could be replaced by icons, and then it could be modded as necessary?

 

M

Mashun

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• Sep 25, 2011

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• #5

Thanks for all of your thoughts. It's especially nice to get some sympathy from someone who has the same problem.

Blois, in my experience the maps generally aren't as much of a problem, I think because you're dealing with a much bigger area. While occasionally there will be two countries colored close enough that I will have trouble quickly distinguishing between the two, there is generally a lot more context involved so color is not necessarily the only way to figure out what I'm looking for. With the asterisk, on the other hand, it's either red or it's green, and the information in those tool tips is often displayed no where else.

Thanks,

Mashun

 

Nuril

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• Sep 25, 2011

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• #6

That's a good point. Probably should be a slightly different symbol for the red ones.

 

olvirki

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• Sep 25, 2011

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• #7

I am not colorblind myself, but paradox should do something about this. I am hopeful though, many games today have viewing options for colorblind people.

 

Nick B II

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• Sep 25, 2011

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• #8

Marquis d Blois said:

Perhaps if green was a tick, and red an X, you won' have any problems.
However, unless CK2 has been developed from the start with this in mind, I doubt so late such an addition would be made.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't go that far. Changing an icon is probably be as simple as replacing plus.bmp with a new plus.bmp that's color-blind friendly.

They may have to put the new file in with the actual code, and re-compile the game, but you have to recompile every time you test a bug-fix so they're almost certainly doing that anyway.

In other words this particular idea is not only a no-brainer, its also easier to implement then any other idea anyone has ever put forth on this forum.

Nick

 

Ephafn

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• Sep 25, 2011

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• #9

I'm pretty sure that the asterisk is not a icon, but simply the character "*". I don't how complete the font is, but replacing all of them by either a single thicker character () or by two distinct ones (✔ and ✖) should be a quite localized change in the code.

Edit: I checked in the font directory, and Victoria 2 doesn't use Unicode fonts, instead using 255 characters bitmap fonts. So in that case, changing the character would be trickier, as it could involve replacing characters in the font. Although I saw in one of the font (but not all of them), so it is still doable.

 

Last edited: Sep 25, 2011

Kaleidoscope

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• Sep 25, 2011

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• #10

If it's not in stock it should be very, very simple to mod it in on day one. All of the graphics file formtats used in Paradox games are easily edited.

 

besaccia

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Oct 28, 2009

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• Sep 25, 2011

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• #11

There's no problem. It should be easy to solve with a patch, maybe PI could Launch a series of special patches for all of their games solving other special issues.

 

U

unmerged(75409)

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Apr 30, 2007

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• Sep 25, 2011

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• #12

At present though they use the same asterisk for both "yes" and "no" - they would need to change that in order to make anything moddable.

 

Shuriken

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• Sep 26, 2011

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• #13

Mashun said:

While occasionally there will be two countries colored close enough that I will have trouble quickly distinguishing between the two,

Click to expand...

One doesn't have to be colourblind to come up against this.

 

U

unmerged(371738)

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• Sep 26, 2011

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• #14

This makes me wonder if, historically, some commander made a terrible blunder because he couldn't tell the difference between troops on the strategy map.

 

W

womble

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• Sep 26, 2011

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• #15

Bonapartist said:

This makes me wonder if, historically, some commander made a terrible blunder because he couldn't tell the difference between troops on the strategy map.

Click to expand...

It has, historically, been a requirement that officers in the British Army have perfect colour vision. Reading maps is harder (brown vs red for roads, for example on OS maps), and having to ask your sergeant what colour that signal flare is doesn't inspire confidence.

Roughly 10% of the market for Paradox games is colour blind to some degree or other, and relying on colour alone to differentiate anything is a bonehead interface design error. The interface should be usable on a monochrome monitor, with colour used as an enhancement (for those that cant take advantage of it). I'd suggest using a green "+" and a red "-" to distinguish the two states.

 

Sarmatian

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• Sep 26, 2011

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• #16

Another thing is that is extremely difficult on newer paradox titles (Vic 2 and HoI3) to distuingish different countries on a political map for people who are partially colour blind. EU3 I've had no problem but HOI3 and VIC2 give me huge problems.

 

unmerged(303218)

Colonel

Apr 17, 2011

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• Sep 26, 2011

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• #17

Bonapartist said:

This makes me wonder if, historically, some commander made a terrible blunder because he couldn't tell the difference between troops on the strategy map.

Click to expand...

During the Napoleonic era (in the Spanish theater) a commander saved his troops by ordering 'advance' but pointing away from the enemy because he was blind.
I'll edit as soon as I find out who he was and etc..

 

King of Men

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• Sep 27, 2011

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• #18

Those who are saying "it can be modded" are misunderstanding the problem. Tooltips are plain text, not icons; and the asterisks are autogenerated by the engine, not part of any text files. Paradox could make it possible to mod the problem away by introducing an icon in place of the text; or they could fix it themselves by using a different font character for "true" and "false"; but either way it requires code changes.

Touching the problem of distinguishing between nations, that can sometimes be difficult even for people who are not colourblind; but this can be dealt with by modding, because the RGB values of the national colours are stored in text files.

 

Zigster

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• Sep 28, 2011

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• #19

Well I just wanted to say that I hope Paradox puts this as a high priority, especially since it's such a simple fix.

I agree with Sarmatian. I'm not colourblind and I have a hard time with the HOI3 and Vic 2 map sometimes, so can't imagine it for someone who is colourblind. Recently played as Nepal in Vic 2 and my Russian border was ridiculous, almost the same colour. Wish there was a way to change the colours of nations.

 

Kallocain

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• Sep 28, 2011

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• #20

Thank you all who posted suggestions and issues here. We have begun discussion how we can make our games more accessible for people who are colour-blind, and I think we'll manage to cook something up for CKII. You writing about it here really helped to lift the issue.