Accessibility features may not be at the forefront of every player’s mind, but the same cannot be said for developers. Sometimes you need to consider every second of your gameplay, keeping certain obstacles in mind.
This is not a more obvious place than color blindness. If a developer like Ubisoft wants to have access to the game for poor eyesight, then there’s a need for a way to see what they’re looking at.
Please enter your Ubisoft Chroma. The tools they have created for use in their games are designed to make it easy to see what some people see when they watch the final game. And now they have released this tool for anyone to use.
Part of the game’s design, especially the UI elements that need to be clearly visible in a moment’s notification, are often designed with color blindness in mind.
If forgotten, color blind people may have trouble identifying friends and enemies, or checking how many bombs remain in the Quick Access Bar. Sometimes it’s rough for them.
With simple changes, it is often easy to make color blindness in almost or any form of access to the game. However, finding an accurate solution is a challenge if there is no way to accurately see what can obscure some forms of colour. That’s how Chroma looks like it.
With Chroma, an estimated 300 million people worldwide affected by Colorblindness, developers can accurately replicate their experiences and create accessible content to meet their needs.
Ubisoft revealed this in its official blog post. There, I directly linked the project’s GitHub page.
“Chroma is a testament to the team’s innovation and dedication,” said Jawad Shakil, product manager at Ubisoft. “Their work is already making a difference in how they design games with accessibility in mind.”
Open-sourcing chroma is a proud step and everyone can benefit from this innovation.
How Ubisoft Chroma works
The Ubisoft Chroma is designed to be extremely simple. As far as developers are concerned, there’s not much difference to putting your eyes on lenses that filter the entire range of colors into what a certain type of color blindness sees.
According to the list of features in the project (thanks, Boingboing), Ubisoft Chroma provides developers to all types of color blindness, showing everything on one monitor without affecting the performance of the actual game.
Chroma works in all kinds of games, as it’s just a filter. If you want to know how color blind people experience their games, you can see it yourself. No questions.
Ubisoft Chroma is freely available and is completely open source, so if developers feel the need to adjust to their own preferences, you can.
