Help for players with sight problem?

[psionic soldier]

Good afternoon commanders.

I have bought the beta and will somehow manage anyway I hope but I am curious to know if this game will have customisation for people with sight problems.

I am an extreme case but I would be amazed if there were not others that will be facing problems too of varying degrees.

I am pretty much totally colourblind as well as being registered blind. If it comes to it I know I can play single player after the final release and crash to my hearts content without spoiling other peoples game but with a few tweaks it would still be better, well for me.

Will we be able to change the hud colour?

Will we be able to change radar target blip colours? Will we be able to assign stripes to target blips on the radar so I could give enemies a red icon with a white stripe? Or a red icon with a white exclamation mark within it?

Will we be able to make the fonts a little bigger if we need?

I don't expect the game to be adapted just for my needs but I can't be the only one with potential problems as something like 15% of the world's population are colourblind I believe, give or take of course.

Sorry if this has already been discussed.

 

[Bromley86]

I've seen people post that HUD will likely be customisable. Nothing official though.

I've not seen anything about the radar being customisable. Ditto fonts.

Not that it has any bearing on your requests, but I think colour blindness is closer to 4% of the world's pop.

 

[Kernel Kwatz!]

This is most certainly an indirect response but you might find VoiceAttack (windows only) to be a useful tool. It will allow you to bind voice commands to ship actions that would otherwise be button or keyboard activated. It means less fiddling with in-game menus etc that might otherwise be tricky to see.

http://www.voiceattack.com/

 

[McLaine]

Showed the game to a friend at the weekend. He too is colour blind.

It meant he could not distinguish the Cockpit hud very well, nor could he tell what state the Shields were in and such.

Any chance of a Dev comment as to wether this is being thought about?

 

[Adam Lusardi]

There are threads I know on these subjects but the forum search let me down. Google "elite dangerous colour blind" worked but I know some players with greater sight difficulties......I'm sure they will be along shortly to help out.

 

[Patrick_68000]

but I think colour blindness is closer to 4% of the world's pop.

You're right. Between 8 and 10% of men are affected in Western countries (But also at the world level). Cases among women are very rare, only 0.4% are concerned.

 

[psionic soldier]

Thanks for the replies.

It's been a few decades since I checked up on the actual numbers so sorry for the error. The point I was trying to make should still be valid though as (unless things have changed now) the majority of gamers are male and colourblindness will potentially affect a hefty number of those seeing that it affects males mostly.

Anyway to update my feedback after playing over the weekend.

Thanks for the advice Kernel Kwatz! I had seen some of the Youtube vids before buying so had seen some of those guys using Voiceattack and figured it might help. I am only playing solo online and am avoiding fighting until I have kitted a Cobra out but the Voiceattack is brilliant and helps massively.

For me learning a new game is like having to climb a mountain so some of my initial post reflected how frustrating that is. I have to really give this game a lot of credit though as things scale better then most games I have tried when scaling up the gfx resolution. Obviously being able to edit fonts and such would still be good but for me for now the Voiceattack is allowing me to bypass having to go through menus and such.

I really can't praise Voiceattack enough, it's the best thing since......well Elite! I have been waiting decades for this game and I didn't think I would be able to play it now that it's here but I can without crashing all the time too!

I have seen that there is another thread doing the rounds that asks for different hud colours so no idea if the mods want to merge this. This one does mention font sizes and target blip icon customisation too though and I would still love to be able to change those and this is not just asking for a cosmetic change either. As it stands, there is no point me checking the scanner as green, yellow, orange and red are all similar.

Like I said it would be great to assign something like an exclamation mark on a hostile target's blip to make it stand out more. Different shapes or icons might work too.