Video games taught me I was colorblind
Wait, is Toad’s head red or brown? Credit: Bob Al-Greene / Mashable Almost 15 years ago, the way I looked at the world changed. Literally. I was playing Peggle , a popular puzzle video game about shooting balls at colored pegs when I realized I had a problem: The green and orange pegs looked almost identical to me. After a bit of online research, some soul-searching, and a visit to the eye clinic, I […]
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Almost 15 years ago, the way I looked at the world changed. Literally.
I was playing Peggle, a popular puzzle video game about shooting balls at colored pegs when I realized I had a problem: The green and orange pegs looked almost identical to me.
After a bit of online research, some soul-searching, and a visit to the eye clinic, I was diagnosed with moderate red-green colorblindness. Suddenly, my eyes were opened to how games handled colorblind accessibility. Video games are by far the most common reminder of my different color vision in daily life — it just doesn’t come up that often outside of gaming.
Since then, I’ve always checked to see if a game has decent accessibility options. Peggle has stuck with me because it has an option to put icons on the pegs, negating the need to see the colors at all. But that’s not always the case. Sure, gaming has made plenty of strides over the years to help people like me, but some common problems persist even today. Whether you know it or not, color can still be an exclusionary barrier to enjoying video games.
Don’t ask what colors I can see, please
Over the years, I’ve come to a startling realization about my own condition: A lot of folks just plain don’t understand what colorblindness entails. Given that there are an estimated 300 million colorblind people (per a 2019 estimate by the colorblind assistance company Enchroma) in a world of nearly 8 billion, that’s understandable, I suppose. You might go years without meeting a colorblind person, and since you can only see through your own eyes, you can’t even tell unless they mention it.
