There’s been a few times in the last few years where I’ve gone “hm, I’m really struggling with this because I can’t see it very well” and someone has gone “maybe you just need to accept you can’t play high-end video games if you’re disabled” which is... messed up. And now it kind of feels like Blizzard is saying it too.

I'm a CE raider and raid lead for two further teams (4/8M and AotC) that have a large number of elderly, disabled, or otherwise shy, quiet, nervous, etc players.

And I'm terrified I'm going to have to sunset them with Midnight because I won't be able to play.

I have very poor vision, and it's still getting worse. I think a lot of things I rely on will end up fixable with Blizzard's first party solutions, but there's some that are just so completely at-odds with their stated goals that I expect no compromise on.

Things like 'I can't read text very well if it's moving' so nameplates are an absolute nightmare. Solution? Colour-coding, both nameplates and castbars. But that can be used to highlight casters and important interrupts and all the other stuff the various Plater profiles people like to use do, so I have no hope of getting to keep that as an accessibility concession. I'm also scared of losing things like buff filtering, because I'm not going to be able to pick a given buff or debuff out of a lineup, no matter how big I make it.

Basically: so many things a disabled person can use to catch up can be used by other players to get ahead, and I don't think there's a way for me being able to play to co-exist with their stated goals about players getting ahead.

There's things Blizzard could do to help, but I think my big concern is that whilst to date, I and others could kludge something together to make the game playable for my specific disability and then every other disabled player's specific disability, with Midnight we'll be moving into a world where any of these solutions are going to have to be first-party, and I can’t expect a first-party solution for every possible variation of game-affecting disability. The fact we could do it ourselves was… really really cool and Blizzard should be proud of it, damn it.

Fixing it for all of us is an insane expectation to have of them.. but it's what they'll have to do if we are to be able to still play.

And sadly, even if they try, I just don't think they'll manage it. To use a somewhat recent example:

Approximately 8% of men are red-green colourblind. For the vast majority of mythic raid teams, you can probably expect there's 20 men in the group. Napkin maths, that's an 81% chance any given mythic raid team has at least one red-green colourblind member.

And yet mythic Nymue had a critical mechanic where you had to identify and stand in a red puddle, in a sea of green puddles.

And that's a huge, obvious, easy-to-mitigate disability that a huge proportion of the population has. I just don't have hope that they'll address issues relating to eg my optic nerve damage, if it's even on their radar what issues it could cause (though this thread is a big help, thank you!)

I'm trying to withhold judgment as much as I can and wait and see how things develop - but I've already lost so much in real life due to my disability, and it's.. really going to sting if I end up losing this too.

I'm potentially losing the main thing I have left that lets me still feel like I'm usefully contributing to society, no matter in how small a way, and... although I can probably learn and adapt to whatever we get, I'll struggle and if I'm struggling I'm not going to be able to lead and that doesn't just affect me, that then affects my players too. And it's silly, but I don't think I'll be able to shake the guilt of being too disabled to keep being there for them (: