EVE Online introduces colorblindness accessibility options

A couple of years ago, my husband was taking one of those online tests to determine color blindness and pulled me over to read the bubbles on his screen. I rattled them off, and he stared at me, asking me whether I was pranking him — because he couldn’t read them at all. Many shades of red and green pretty much look the same to him. He’s colorblind, we’d realized, and suddenly a lot of the problems he’d had with colormatching and video game interfaces all these years made sense to us.

He’s also an active EVE Online player, so I’ll be excited to show him this news piece when it’s done: EVE Online is adding color blindness accessibility options at last, bringing relief to what we can reasonably estimate is around 8% of the game’s playerbase.

“Some games that offer color blind modes simply replace all color on the screen using the selected color blind hue mapping, but as it seems people don’t really care too much for that approach since it makes the game world look weird for no good reason as it’s only color used for indication of state that causes problems,” CCP writes. “Instead, we only apply the color-blind hue mapping to UI highlight colors, meaning that it’s mostly icons and text that get affected and not background color, the 3d scene, or graphical images like items. There are a couple UI areas where color blind mode does not work for the time being (most noticeably the scanning 3d scene), but it is our hope we’ll get all those areas covered in the future.”

The toggles are on Singularity for testing now and should go live for everyone in June. If you’re colorblind, give the survey a shot too and let them know how it’s working.