LFG: Gamers With Disabilities
MMOs have always been a great level playing field for people that are different in some way. For those of us with social disorders ranging from “simple” social anxiety to Asperger’s, MMOs offered an incredibly social outlet. For those of us who type faster than we dance or run or throw punches, MMOs gave us a place to shine. And for those of us who are limited in movement by time, money, or our bodies, MMOs offered connection to a world of friends and family.
That warm and fuzzy article has been written. What I want to do is an Examiner column on the things the next generation of MMOs need to do to ensure access for the widest possible group of gamers.
If there are modifications you’ve found in some games, and you need them in all games, let me know. (*cough*text resizing*cough* – some of us have been reading faded pages in bad light for decades now, and can’t see teeny print anymore.) Tell me what tools, UI mods, and options you need to make the most of your gaming experience. And hey, dream big. I always thought it would be cool if I could hold down one key and trigger voice commands – run, open, use, accept, decline, wave.
Finally, if you’re willing to be quoted in this column, or willing to send me a photo of yourself seated at your gaming rig, please email me at my first name at brokentoys dot ORG. It’s not dot com.
Your title reminded me of a thread I saw a few months ago in warhammeralliance. It was a guy that had no use of his legs (paraplegic?) and he took offense at the message in Warhammer you get when you are stunned, knocked down, etc. (“You Are Disabled” in big text across the screen).
I think he was asking for a mod that changed it, but I’m not sure anyone made it for him.
Looking forward to the Examiner column, I love that particular aspect of MMOs; when you group with random people you don’t know, you could find your best friend. Anything could happen!
One feature I would like to see in all MMOs is the ability to join groups on the fly with no pressure to stay or do anything in particular. I think it encourages shy people to try doing things with people even if it makes them uncomfortable to talk/type/etc.
In the upcoming patch 3.1 notes in WoW there’s a new “Colour Blind” option in the UI controls. Timely.
My ‘disability’ is RSI. I have to be careful what I do with my keyboard hand, so I prefer to play healers and use clickcasting extensively. I bought a new mouse recently purely so I could bind actions to left and right scroll, putting a total of 8 heals on my mouse.
Aside from that, I wrote a couple of rants about my experience going from a heavily customised WoW UI to LotRO recently.
http://fatbottomedelves.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/setting-up-the-user-interface/
http://fatbottomedelves.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/felonies/
Summary: Icons, maps, bags, mail and auctions.
colour blind, text resizing, vocal binds, vocal cues, the ability to “flat screen” 3d environments for spatially challenged folks, mouse gestures for those who only have one arm/hand to play better, why isn’t there a mouse that vibrates to let the deaf get cues that are normally vocal?
that’s off the top of my head, MMO’s really aren’t that accessible to play for disabled folks imho, they’re more of a social tool.
It’s interesting that Companies wont design better, or can’t design better for the disabled but they’ll design content for the 1% in game. Priorities seem a bit skewed there.
First time commenter – Article caught my eye because recently I’ve played with a disabled child in Runes of Magic. His mother is a member of our guild and she teaches him to play as a creative outlet and share in her own passion for games. He’s 8 years old and is deaf and some other disability which I don’t know how to say in a politically correct manner – something to do with cognitive ability.
Anyway, he plays very well except for having to keep him focused on occasion. I was shocked t find out that he was only 8 yrs old. One of the things I love about MMOs is how it levels the playing field for social interaction. We’re all equal as those avatars. Things along the lines of what Jason said are important. I don’t know how anyone with a sight disability plays the average MMO. Too many little things necessary on the screen. Many interactions that only have audio queues. Games are equally keyboard and mouse friendly – some have interactions ONLY possible with a mouse with others the opposite. That needs to be leveled out – all things equally accessible with keyboard or mouse. How do you loot without the mouse??? How do you interact with NPCs if you struggle to double-click? W101 is the only game I can recall that allows you to select NPCs and execute the click to engage one with the keyboard or mouse. Stuff like that has to be equalized across the board.
I don’t know how useful this would be, but I recently found the following post on Lifehacker, which describes a web-applet that can resize text on a webpage
http://lifehacker.com/5195405/readable-app-formats-web-text-for-ultra+customized-reading
It also has a link in the opening paragraph to another gadget that might be of use.
I can’t dig up the post from the WoW forums, but WAY WAY back 2005-ish someone posted a thread about the lack of color blindness accessability to WoW. Much of the UI etc. involved varying colors to relay information, and there were no settings or addons to address this available at the time.
In a typical gotta-love-the-interweb-moment, the discussion pointed out that a smaller percentage of Americans are color blind than are afraid of spiders. The topic morphed into a mega-thread about how the WoW developers were not taking into consideration the feelings of the arachnaphobes. Then someone put up a post about how to hack the WoW files to change all of the spider models into bunnies or something.
@Saylah – Come on, you remember EQ… tab target your trainer, start typing Hail, attack him, and instadie. No mouse required.
Tab targeting in general takes care of NPC interactions, but is a lot harder to use for looting, especially when you have 25 dead bodies and 5 live ones… tab could really get messy there.
I think voice commands are really the next step in accessibility, not to mention general ease of use and fun. Granted, your husband/wife will probably get tired of hearing you say “Attack Orc” every 5 minutes for 12 hours, but someone will figure out a way to make it work. Speech interpretation could really handle a lot of interface issues… “Loot Corpse”, “Buy Bread”, “Bake Bread”, “Crush”.
Sorry, got off on a flashback tangent there…
Tio
I don’t know how helpful it might be for someone with disabilities, but both at home and at work I have multiple monitors. I would love to have one monitor for my window into the game world and another monitor for all the crap … chat, combat log, stat windows, maps, etc. This would give me a lot more room for making font sizes bigger or clickable areas larger … and not crowd out my view of the game world.
I wrote an article that touched on this a while back for Massively and talked to some disabled gamers about the mods they used and design ideas that would make games easier (or harder) for them to play. You may want to tap that same community for some more feedback.
http://www.massively.com/2008/04/28/player-vs-everything-gaming-with-a-disability/
And this thread reminds me of something posted on “User Friendly”
http://ars.userfriendly.org/
Under the daily comic is a petition more games to include subtitles for deaf gamers. The petition can be found at:
http://www.petitiononline.com/Captions/petition.html
I hope this will also help raise some awareness.
DAoC had a “nearest object” command and mobs dropped their items on the floor rather than in corpses.
I had “nearest object” bound to H and ‘get’ to G – so Decathalon-esque tapping of hghghghghghghghghghghghg picked up any loot in range.
Inventory management could be tricky without a mouse – but surely you could have an accessibility mode where you tab into the window and select items with arrow keys… then a keyboard command to do the left/right click with context menus.
I think everyone in DAOC spammed hghghghghghg regularly, I remember that I was shocked that WoW didn’t have this functionality when it came out.
Hmm, typing hghghghg still feels natural…..
Ah, the good old days.
I think the WoW model whereby the UI is very customisable is the way forward (not sure whether other MMOs and games do this). If the UI is customisable then the community can make mods which permit audio feedback to appear as text for the deaf, etc. Obviously this depends on the developers permitting sufficient UI customisation such as keyboard looting and UI recolouring which I guess aren’t available in WoW.
Educating programmers about common problems is good, but I wouldn’t require them to program for a specified list of disabilities. I know at work we’re recommended not to use red and green on a chart since that’s the most common form of colour-blindness (although in itself is relatively rare).
Also I think there’s a serious point in Centuri’s comment on arachnophobia vs colour-blindness. While trying to cater for all people is good, there are diminishing returns – each smaller group of needs that gets addressed adds costs to everyone else. There is a point where the developer has to say that catering for a specific disability isn’t economically viable for them. This is where I see the UI customisation coming in, as while it may not be viable for the developer there is often a fan somewhere willing to develop a mod for free to cope. After all, there’s lots of fan language translation efforts out there, why not disability mods as well?
And Massively goes and does this…
http://www.massively.com/2009/04/09/do-developers-consider-disabled-gamers-enough/
They took it from the MSNBC article – someone sent me that this morning and I just sighed. My timing sucks.
Really, not too much – the point of my article was Things We Can DO, not helpless handflapping. So I’ll still write the piece, and include a link to this.
Having a minor cordination disability, I find games getting harder and harder to play as I get older. I started in Muds and no coordination there. Everquest was the first game that really forced coordinated movement in fights in a MMORPG, still it was more about strategy than mindless random movements.
WOW (EQ 2.0 really) can be frustrating on some fights and your response to hit the right key is about half a second. The average fight requires alot of conditional movement and keys for abilities. The class abilities might be strategy based but the movements are more about reacting to pixels on the screen, like a monkey hitting a switch for food at the right time.
I found a good mouse and keyboard with the right macros helps deal with my reaction time. Mindless repetition helps too.
But when dealing with a handicap you have to think about what is the easiest way I can cut down required reaction time in terms of game strategy. For healing , it was eliminating the need to target anyone. Using an addon to mouse over a player’s name (with lots of information on that players state) and just pressing a mouse key makes up for my lost reaction time.
Another “trick” I do on some fights since I have issues knowing left from right is to face right or left a little and then I know if I someone yells left I know its not the way I am facing.
Still it frustrates me that over time (and better latencies) MMO’s are going more for mindless twitch over strategy. I do not for instance understand how anyone with any serious reaction impairment (mind is very slight, except for the left /right thing) can play these games.
For me the things that helped are 1) Visual UI (grid is amazing for showing you everything about a player for instance in a very small area)
2) Devices that minimize your brains need to do complex things. For example mousing over a player and hitting a button on your mouse might seem like the same amount of work as clicking on the player and hitting a key with your other hand but its not. For me using one hand vs 2 is big reaction saver HUGE (I would guess at least 3 times the latency). I think its reaction vs my less efficient brain figuring out the 2 hand thing.