The Guide Dogs Gaming Team caught up with Aiden, also known as LockeHearted on Twitch, to find out more about his experiences of the gaming world and how he adapts gameplay to work for him and his vision impairment.
Hi Aiden! First of all, what games do you like to play?
The genres of games that I enjoy are all across the board - I love cosy games, visual novels, horror games, MMOs (massively multiplayer online games), just about every genre under the sun, although the only first-person shooter games I enjoy are the Borderlands series. The games that I play most days are Dead by Daylight, Fortnite Festival Stage, Path of Titans, WolfQuest, Phasmophobia and Roblox.
Can you tell us more about your vision impairment and how it affects your experience of gaming?
I have an astigmatism and a lazy eye which limits my vision, as well as tritanomaly type colour blindness - this means some colours (particularly oranges and purples) are very difficult for me to see, and all the colours surrounding them on the spectrum can be difficult if they aren’t very saturated.
This makes it hard for me to see just about anything that has a primary colour of orange or purple. If two colours are too similar to each other they blend together. For example, in some video games there are items you can pick up which have different tiers of rarity, indicated by different colours; typically orange and purple are used to specify which tier an item is in, and as I struggle to tell these colours apart, I instead need to read the specific details on an item to tell if it’s better or worse.
I also require high contrast and large text, as without it I tend to have to move my camera around and squint really close to the screen in order to figure out what it’s telling me to do.
What games do you like to play that have good accessibility features, based on your needs?
Fortnite has surprisingly good accessibility features – it has multiple options for colour blindness, and you can adjust the intensity to match your needs.
WolfQuest, a wolf simulation game, also has an option to customise the colours on the map which show the territories of other wolf packs surrounding yours, so you can tell them apart from one another.
What games have some accessibility features, but could be improved?
Dead By Daylight [pictured], a survival horror game in which you can play as either the killer or a survivor, has a lot of heavily colour-coded information in the game (for example red scratch marks or auras around other players). Unfortunately its colour-blind options mostly just put a filter on the screen that matches your colour blindness - for example, if you struggle to see the colour red, rather than changing red to blue, the filter will turn red to yellow, which is the same colour as almost everything else in the game and does not help people who see red as yellow already.
Dead By Daylight also has an option to increase the font size, but it only increases some of the text when you’re in a match against other players, and nothing else. It isn’t very helpful.
Ideally, Dead By Daylight would increase all text sizes and have multiple options, as well as a built-in feature that changes each important colour (for example the auras of people playing as ‘killers’ or ‘survivors’, scratch marks, blood pools) to a colour of your choice.
WolfQuest doesn’t allow you to change the colours of anything but the map’s colours. Anything in-game, such as coloured scents for you to follow as a wolf, are still easy to miss if you’re colour blind. The text is also very small, to the point where even people with healthy vision may struggle to read it.
Much like Dead By Daylight, I would like to see the game developers for WolfQuest increase the font size, or have a few options for how big you would like the text to be, and a colour changing option for everything important.
As everything in Roblox is built by users, it is entirely reliant on each individual creator to add accessibility features - I would love to see Roblox implement changes across the board to make the game more accessible as a whole.
What additional software do you use to support your game play?
Nvidia filters have been a huge help for me, as they have various colour and colour-blind options that will change colours entirely (if you have an Nvidia graphics card installed in your computer, pressing Alt+F3 will bring up a menu while in a game that has given it permission). For example, red scratch marks in Dead By Daylight can be made neon blue, which is very helpful.
There are other filters that do similar things - GShade and ReShade are both software programmes you can install on your PC which allow you to change everything visual in a game, for example sharpness, brightness, and colour overlays. Although both have been recommended to me, I can’t speak personally on how useful they are for colour-blind accessibility.
Unfortunately, Nvidia graphics cards aren’t very cheap, and both GShade and ReShade have been the subject of uncertainty over their cyber security. None are perfect. In an ideal world we wouldn’t need filters in order to be able to play the game like anyone with healthy vision.
When you play games by yourself or with friends/other players, how does this affect your experience?
If I’m playing games by myself and I’m struggling to see something, I’ll take a screenshot or a picture on my phone and zoom in. Alternatively, I will send a picture to a friend to help me distinguish colours. If I’m playing with friends I will ask them questions - all of my friends are aware of my condition and are very skilled at describing things to me in the way I need.
Do you have lived experience of playing online or offline games with a vision impairment? We’d love to talk to you about your experiences and what you would like to see in future in the gaming world – get in touch by emailing gaming@guidedogs.org.uk.
You can also support Guide Dogs by fundraising though gaming or streaming! To find out more about our latest gaming fundraiser, follow this link to 250 Challenge.
