As anyone with colour blindness will tell you, trying to read a game’s HUD and interface can be an absolute nightmare. Developers frequently forget that for many people certain colours are impossible to distinguish, which is problematic when colour is used to show information like friendly or enemy players, or how rare and item is.
World of Warcraft relies quite heavily on colour to inform, so it’s about time that it had options for people with colour vision issues. Thankfully they’re coming in the next patch.
Talking on a new Battle.net post, Blizard describe three new sets of filters beig included in an Accessibility menu, which will help players with protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia.
“Each set of colour adjustments is available via a handy dropdown selector, and each comes with a ‘strength’ slider. The farther to the right you set the slider, the more the game removes potentially problematic wavelengths of colour for each type,” Blizzard said.
World of Warcraft uses colour to highlight the rarity of items, but with the accessibility options you can change this to a text explanation. “For example, when you move your mouse cursor over a piece of rare gear and then a piece of epic gear, the game colours the names of the items blue and then purple, respectively. With ‘UI Colourblind Mode’ enabled, the game will add the words ‘Rare’ and ‘Epic’ to the tooltips for those items,” Blizzard said.
The same system will apply to friendly, neutral, and hostile targets, too.