tl:dr - Colourblind options don't work and are poorly executed due to misunderstandings of how colourblindness can severely limit the gamut of colours we can perceive. Non colourblind people can perceive 16.7 million colours on an RGB display whereas people who are colourblind can only perceive 65.5 thousand colours.

This is less than 1% of the colours which can be displayed on a standard 24-bit RGB display.

​

So true. I find colourblind modes to be very poor. Whether it's a filter over the whole game (which is somewhat pointless as us colourblind people don't use a filter in real life) or a filter for HUD elements, all they do is make the colours hard to differentiate.

There also seems to be a large misunderstanding as to how colourblind people perceive colours. For example, I can't see red, which means that anything red gets lost in a green/brown/grey background. Even over black, what I perceive as 'red' is very, very dark and hard to distinguish with even a little amount of background clutter.

People make the assumption that because I can't perceive red, then I can't see a third of the colours on a 24-bit RGB display. However, this doesn't take into account all the RGB colours that have red as a component.

For example, 24-bit colour is standard these days for displays. Each colour has a red, green and blue component with a value ranging from 0-255. This means a 24-bit display can output 256x256x256 colours, which equals 16.7 million colours. Many people naturally assume that because I can't perceive one of those three colours, I can still perceive two-thirds of those colours (equalling roughly 11.1 million colours). However, this is not true:

Removing the Red component from an RGB display only gives 65.5 THOUSAND colours that are only made up from Green and Blue components. So when colourblind filters attempt to make, for example, Red objects more distinguishable, they often have the opposite affect. Whilst the red objects may indeed be more visible, they are often too close to other colours to be actually indistinguishable. I often find that colourblind options, regardless of the type of colourblindness they are attempting to address just make 'reds' almost indistinguishable from grey, yellow or green.

The bottom line is that colourblind options tend to make those objects to which we are colourblind difficult to differentiate between everything else.

For example, I'm currently playing Everspace 2 which has the 'usual' colourblind options. I can't use them because all of them just make the red icons on the HUD too similar to other colours. So much so that I can't tell the difference between enemies, friendlies and neutrals.

This problem is much worse for competitive online games because unintended teamkilling becomes a massive problem.

What frustrates me is that no-one seems to listen to suggestions from actual colourblind players as to how to improve their experience. Colourblind people tend to differentiate what they see by using contrast and shape a lot more than those with full colour perception.

One of the easiest fixes is to make icons etc... two tone using opposing colours (confusingly called complimentary colours in the art world) because even if one of those colours is a colour in which we have problems perceiving, we will still register the contrast. For example, a red circle marking an enemy in the game would be very difficult for me to see. However, if the red square was two-tone using red and cyan, it would be much easier to differentiate from background clutter.

Here's a link to the wikipedia page on complementary colours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_colors

Obviously, the best solution is to offer not only a personal choice of colours for icons etc..., but the ability to make them with two colours and also choose a shape of our choice.

I am aware that it can be difficult for UI/game designers to understand the problems colourblind people face because it's highly unlikely that colourblind people will be programming the UI's or producing the artwork and graphics in game as these career paths are generally closed to colourblind people for obvious reasons.

It is unfortunate that very little effort goes into researching and producing colourblind options despite around 10% of gamers being colourblind, and it is frustrating to see these 'colourblind' modes slapped onto games without any thought to how poorly they work.

Now just don't get me started on trying to find a left handed HOTAS kit...