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The Accessibility Pass: All is forgiven.
Archived Post
Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
Hokay, preface.
I have to admit that with the new minimap and Cryptic's realisation that CO will never land on the consoles, I thought that they'd start just making everything tiny to suit the demands of 'hardcore PC gamers' who apparently all have eagle vision. I don't know if you hang around PC gaming sites, but this is something that people ***** about relentlessly. But me? I'm always secretly thankful that the likes of Skyrim has a giant user interface. And one thing a lot of gamers don't tend to be is empathic to accessibility needs. Often, they'll make demands of PC-focused developers for ridiculously tiny fonts and interfaces, often, the developers will listen.
I feared that CO was going that way with the new map, that Cryptic would be focusing on making the UI PC-centric, which would screw up the more console-like aesthetic they'd had going with it, which made it easy for visually handicapped people like myself to play. And that upset me because CO is a game that I dearly love and play far too much of. So I did kick up a stink about it, because I've poured so much time and money into this game because I love it. I'm often found around the Internet giving CO far, far too much praise.
So the thought of not being able to play it again due to stupid design choices was upsetting.
But, lo and behold, this patch... kind of went out of its way to make things more accessible. If there was a site that scored on accessibility concerns, I'd give Cryptic at least an 8/10 with this. There are things I'd like to see stil lbut I really can't complain! The minimap is now resizable independent of the main UI, but now I can actually read the damn mission texts. That's actually put them up a good point over where they originally were. So not only did they listen, not only did they care about accessibility concerns, but they made it better.
Cryptic, for what it's worth, you're definitely back in my good graces. Accessibility counts to me. All too often I've been left in the corner in regards to games because I'm visually disabled, this means that what I can play I'm a bit limited to, and this even includes MMOs. MMOs that don't give a damn about accessibility and have tiny, tiny UIs I just can't play.
But this latest patch was Cryptic saying that they do care about accessibility. That means a lot.
And you can quote me on this. Keep this up, Cryptic, and you'll be well on the way to becoming one of the most accessible MMORPGs out there. All you could really use now are things like...
- Individual scaling for all UI elements.
- Some kind of audio notification on low health (optional for those that don't want it).
- Audio notification of powers coming off cooldown (toggleable for each power).
- Closed caption subtitles for all the stuff in the game.
That's about all I can think of. Which is awesome. I'd say that it might need a colour-blindness pass, but really, I can't think of any elements in CO where one would have trouble distinguishing something based on colour. Does anyone have any input on this?
But yeah. CO is well on its way to being a damn paragon of accessibility. Something that I can point at to more stubborn PC-only developers and say "Look at that, be like that."
So I guess this is my apology. I'm sorry for having lost faith in the folks at Cryptic there, for a bit, but believe me when I say that it wouldn't be the first time I've seen accessibility thrown out of the window, and I've seen a game that I love either become very difficult to play, or impossible. And I was worried that would be the case here, too. You'd be amazed at how many developers just don't give a **** about accessibility no matter how much you complain.
Nice to know that Cryptic does.
I have to admit that with the new minimap and Cryptic's realisation that CO will never land on the consoles, I thought that they'd start just making everything tiny to suit the demands of 'hardcore PC gamers' who apparently all have eagle vision. I don't know if you hang around PC gaming sites, but this is something that people ***** about relentlessly. But me? I'm always secretly thankful that the likes of Skyrim has a giant user interface. And one thing a lot of gamers don't tend to be is empathic to accessibility needs. Often, they'll make demands of PC-focused developers for ridiculously tiny fonts and interfaces, often, the developers will listen.
I feared that CO was going that way with the new map, that Cryptic would be focusing on making the UI PC-centric, which would screw up the more console-like aesthetic they'd had going with it, which made it easy for visually handicapped people like myself to play. And that upset me because CO is a game that I dearly love and play far too much of. So I did kick up a stink about it, because I've poured so much time and money into this game because I love it. I'm often found around the Internet giving CO far, far too much praise.
So the thought of not being able to play it again due to stupid design choices was upsetting.
But, lo and behold, this patch... kind of went out of its way to make things more accessible. If there was a site that scored on accessibility concerns, I'd give Cryptic at least an 8/10 with this. There are things I'd like to see stil lbut I really can't complain! The minimap is now resizable independent of the main UI, but now I can actually read the damn mission texts. That's actually put them up a good point over where they originally were. So not only did they listen, not only did they care about accessibility concerns, but they made it better.
Cryptic, for what it's worth, you're definitely back in my good graces. Accessibility counts to me. All too often I've been left in the corner in regards to games because I'm visually disabled, this means that what I can play I'm a bit limited to, and this even includes MMOs. MMOs that don't give a damn about accessibility and have tiny, tiny UIs I just can't play.
But this latest patch was Cryptic saying that they do care about accessibility. That means a lot.
And you can quote me on this. Keep this up, Cryptic, and you'll be well on the way to becoming one of the most accessible MMORPGs out there. All you could really use now are things like...
- Individual scaling for all UI elements.
- Some kind of audio notification on low health (optional for those that don't want it).
- Audio notification of powers coming off cooldown (toggleable for each power).
- Closed caption subtitles for all the stuff in the game.
That's about all I can think of. Which is awesome. I'd say that it might need a colour-blindness pass, but really, I can't think of any elements in CO where one would have trouble distinguishing something based on colour. Does anyone have any input on this?
But yeah. CO is well on its way to being a damn paragon of accessibility. Something that I can point at to more stubborn PC-only developers and say "Look at that, be like that."
So I guess this is my apology. I'm sorry for having lost faith in the folks at Cryptic there, for a bit, but believe me when I say that it wouldn't be the first time I've seen accessibility thrown out of the window, and I've seen a game that I love either become very difficult to play, or impossible. And I was worried that would be the case here, too. You'd be amazed at how many developers just don't give a **** about accessibility no matter how much you complain.
Nice to know that Cryptic does.
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Comments
All of these are awesome suggestions.