Team-color mod for the colorblind

[megane]

There've been a couple mentions of possible ways to make Wesnoth more friendly to the colorblind; however, as far as I know there hasn't been any substantial progress thereon. So, I figured I might as well try some things.

AFAICT, there are two main areas in which Wesnoth uses exclusively color to denote information: team colors, and the movement orb. The orb I might deal with in a bit; right now I've fudged together an alternate team-colors.cfg file which will hopefully address some of the more common problems (according to the Fount of Knowledge and personal experience, red/green, blue/yellow, and blue/purple). I'm not colorblind myself, so anyone who is, please let me know if this is helpful, and what can be done to improve it (i.e. if any of the colors are still hard to distinguish, which, and what would make them easier to differentiate). By the way, the idea here is not to replace the standard colors, but to provide an option for those who have trouble with them.

However, it's clear that this is a stopgap measure: changing the colors will naturally be useless in the case of full colorblindness. As such, I was wondering if it's possible under the current code (or could reasonably become so) to define a completely different ellipse for various teams, so that they could be denoted by patterns, rather than colors.

[doofus-01]

Looking at tcchanges.png, I would say top left & bottom center are an improvement (red and brown?) and so are top center & center left (pink and blue?). But center center & top right are too similar.

Everyone is a little different, so I can only speak for myself.

It's a good idea in any case. I would also vote for the idea of different patterns.

[thespaceinvader]

Honestly, i think changing the colours is always going to cause issues. A better solution would be to put the team number onto the ellipse, as previously proposed here.

[doofus-01]

Numbers would be nice, but providing alternate team-colors.cfg files wouldn't require any programming so it's more likely to happen (megane has already provided one). If someone is having trouble distinguishing teams, they are probably willing to rename a couple of .cfg files.

Unless that would somehow mess up multi-player, though I don't see why it would...

[joshudson]

While I agree the elipse numbers would be the final solution (coders anyone?), the proposed changes would help in the meantime, and as a player of normal vision, I actually prefer the proposed changes to the current.

I remember playing for about two months w/o elipses before most units had TC. It wasn't that bad if your partner was competent. (Only real problem came with dealing with skirmishers of the same race as your partner).

[Blueblaze]

Honestly, how many colorblind people are in Wesnoth?

[thespaceinvader]

As someone in the Off-Topic thread suggested, possibly far less than there would be if the game did something to remove its reliance on colour to tell teams apart...

Honestly, probably not that many. But why should that keep us from doing something about the issue?

[turin]

At least two or three forum members have said that they are color-blind.

[Aethaeryn]

Why not using the coloring fix for now and create a colorblind mode? Then if someone codes the numbers or any more detailed colorblind support, they can add it to the colorblind mode, as well as the color change. We can at least have partial support via this until we have full later.

[Baufo]

What if we made the team colors adjustable by the user so everyone could pick colors he can distinguish?

[irrevenant]

Wouldn't the best way to make colours more distinguishable to colour-blind people be to use a wider range of saturation and brightness? The colours in both palettes seem to be almost entirely at middling levels of saturation and brightness.

[megane]

OK, hopefully this is an improvement.

Or am I wasting my time here?

[Thrawn]

OK, hopefully this is an improvement.

Or am I wasting my time here?

I don't see it as a waste....

anywho, the blue and olive seem a bit hard to see.

[Vendanna]

I think that its easier if the Zoc images were different in form, that way there is no problem to discern it for a colorblind person. Only need to activate them in options and that's all.

Aka, apart of the classic circle, we could have a Cross one, Triangle, Hexagon, etc.

If you activate colorblind, it will change blue to cross, next to triangle, etc... and if they are visible, it will be easy to see for any person.

The problem is that you need to find a way to get a similar effect on the minimap to avoid confusions. But its an improvement overall.

[megane]

Yes, as I said before, if it were possible to assign different ellipse images to different teams, then that would be the solution. However, as far as I know, it is not.