*Suggestion* Barrier free gaming

As someone who lost most his hearing I am kind of sensitive to a thing related.
Most games don't have addtinonal subtitles for deaf people (soundeffect subtitles) actually the only game i know is portal 2.
While subtitles will not be that important in a multiplayer RTS I think it should be considered non the less. (subtitles for commander being attacked)
Of course there are gamers with other disabilities.
To make things short,
a list:
- Colourblind mode
- Subtitles for important soundeffects
- scalable UI (bigger UI elements with a high resolution)
-

this is only the stuff from top of my head... after some sleep io will extend the list
see you soon
Al

I think this is a good idea.

I think a scalable UI would be awesome for everyone, not just deaf/visually impaired people. In fact, the more you can customize the UI, the cooler, and the more you can set it to something that suits you.

As for subtitles on sound effects like the commander being attacked; well, I'd like the ability to have a separate list on the side that might list the general locations of stuff being attacked and what was lost. Even with no hearing problems, it really sucks to be in the middle of a battle, get attacked elsewhere, finish your current fight, and forget exactly where you where attacked before (if enough things are happening at once), so you have to search through all your buildings to find the ones that where damaged/destroyed. Even if you find what was destroyed, you might not remember what was there (if the game will have as many buildings as TA had).

I think this is a valuable thing to have in modern games. I've seen blind people playing text-based MUDs even.

To that degree, you could take the approach of Starcraft 2 and have notifications both audibly and textually on the side. Heck, to give more options, you could set the notifications to persist for either a certain amount of time or until a certain amount of notifications show up on the side. Clicking the notification sends you to the event. This would be valuable both to the impaired and to non-impaired, especially in a game with multiple planetiods.

Option for colorblind teamcolor is a must considering that it is certainly easy to implement.

First post I've replied to.

Great idea! Not only very good for those people who need it, but also commercially exploitable. (If it isn't in already :lol: )

I have seen more games with colorblind mode (examples: (there are more!)
LoL: https://support.leagueoflegends.com/ent ... blind-mode
MW3: http://www.destructoid.com/modern-warfa ... 5541.phtml
WoW: http://us.battle.net/support/en/article ... -patch-4-3
)

Subtitles can't be that hard, especially for a very-customer-orientated company like Uber.

And scalable UI. Well, some games I've loved less because the UI went too small after setting a high resolution, but not a deal breaker.

I think it would also help with a problem people discussed before: the minimap/zoomed out view not being able to show everything. This way you will know there is an attack, or enemy units where spotted (if you want to enable something like this), on the other side of the world you are looking on, or on another planet.

This is great, I like that i'm seeing more games have these sort of features recently

Whilst I think colorblind people are evolutionarily inferior mistakes of nature ( ), I'm amazed at how many games don't support it in a basic capacity, given the number of people who actually are colorblind. Statistically most development teams should have one or two colorblind people...

Oh and god yes scalable UI. I play at 2560x1600 and I hate having itty-bitty eye-strain-o-vision HUDs and UIs. Battlefield 3 is awful for this.

I know this sounds mean, but is it really worth it to spend time and money adding features that 99% of the playerbase wont need/use?

colour blindness effects about 17% of males.

other times you might just want to play with the sound off.

they are a lot more usefull than catering to 1%

Yeah, a 'text instead of sound' feature seems really handy. Actually, it's almost a must have, I'd say.

Being colorblind myself, a colorblind mode would be greatly appreciated.

The others are good ideas as well, and honestly, they should be options in all modern games.

I agree, very good idea!

Technically a colorblind mode wouldn't really require being a 'feature', it would just have to be considered during UI development. http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Yes, in fact the only two games that I've gad to lower the resolution because the UI got too small are...

Total Annihilation and Forged Alliance! So yeah, adjustable UI size in PA would be a most welcome feature.

Also all the other ideas in the thread are good and none sound like they would be a huge amount of extra work, so please include whatever you can to make the game easier to interact with.

I'm red-green colourblind, but to the best of my knowledge it's never been a problem in games. I only ever have issues with dull reds and greens next to each other.

I think most features would be benefitial for erveryone and the implementation should not be to expansive.

But your are right if the budget is as tight as with PA maybe its not an option. I will play it anyway.