Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Access for the Disabled
Kaldara
Member
I'm a 61-year-old utterly inveterate gamer who was in WoW from about week 4 of the initial release until about a week ago. I've been drooling over AoC since I first saw a video about it and I'm very excited about just about every aspect of the game as it has been described in your update videos.
I do have a couple of concerns.
I understand from an earlier update that you do not intend to allow UI modding or macros of any kind.
I get that.
But that does put the responsibility for dealing with access for edge-case users on you guys.
1) Colorblindness - the usual "fix" for this a selector for a user to choose between three variations of colorblindness and then offering a slider to adjust from there. That has never worked terribly well. While it does make the world more vibrant, it does not help with situations where the Human Interface Design Guidelines have been ignored and information has been encoded in colors. A brighter shade of grey does not magically turn into green or yellow or orange or whatever and if green and yellow look the same at one intensity, they're going to look the same at any intensity that leaves the game playable. What I've done in World of Warcraft (for instance) is move some of the nastier color (only) encoding into text overlays on nameplates. Threat and "tagged" status, for instance. I would strongly suggest that there be a symbolic equivalent to ALL information that is also color coded - certainly a player selection of some sort (admittedly a symbol on the screen is less immersive than a color, but it is discernible to the colorblind).
2) Visual acuity - as the population ages, their eyesight fades. Beyond a certain point, correction is not possible. It would be very useful to have the ability to scale text upwards in size (within limits) and if you're not going to allow for UI modification, you should have a mechanism for doing it within the game settings. It's best if it's very context limited (very granular in which text is scaled) rather than an overall scale as much of the text isn't "tactical" in nature and time can be taken to cope with it other ways). Additionally, as age and life batters a person, sometimes the ability to translate from an arbitrary symbol to common meaning is reduced. Fifteen years in World of Warcraft and two strokes later I can't for the life of me attach the class/spec icons to their textual equivalents. Again, with UI modding, I was able (in that game) to create an overlay for the nameplates that stated, in text, the spec and class of the characters I was dealing with. Gating that sort of information behind things that are more difficult to access to an aging brain seems like a quite sort of agism to me and it would be a very good thing if something in the official UI allowed for textual information for any information currently intended to be presented solely as an icon.
3) Input versatility - thankfully I still have use of both of my hands, but my long-time GF who is also a gamer does not. She is limited to one hand and one foot. I have her set up with a mouse that has enough buttons on it to keep her happy and a foot pedal for a few other things - but given the "no macros" statement - I'm a little concerned that there might be a "nothing but a generic mouse and keyboard" rule going as well. That's going to be a problem for her as she literally cannot work both the mouse and the keyboard at the same time. Hopefully any limitation here is simply one of only allowing custom keybinding. We do not, by the way, hardware macro anything. WoW doesn't allow it and it hasn't been necessary for her play to do so. But we would need to be able to use, say, a Logitech G600 Mouse and an ADA foot treadle for an extra "key" provided they're all just mapped to keyboard keys or mouse functions.
I only just bought the basic pre-order package today so I haven't seen any of the insider stuff yet.
I am a retired IT professional with a long, long history in testing systems, so I look forward to participating in Beta2 if I can.
I greatly applaud everything I've seen about this game so far, and I'm not lobbying for a change in the restrictions you've placed on play. I am looking for some assurance that you're not setting this up to exclude the disabled (not something I think you'd do intentionally, but if you don't have an advocate speaking for them (us) it's something that could be done without intent).
Thank you.
I do have a couple of concerns.
I understand from an earlier update that you do not intend to allow UI modding or macros of any kind.
I get that.
But that does put the responsibility for dealing with access for edge-case users on you guys.
1) Colorblindness - the usual "fix" for this a selector for a user to choose between three variations of colorblindness and then offering a slider to adjust from there. That has never worked terribly well. While it does make the world more vibrant, it does not help with situations where the Human Interface Design Guidelines have been ignored and information has been encoded in colors. A brighter shade of grey does not magically turn into green or yellow or orange or whatever and if green and yellow look the same at one intensity, they're going to look the same at any intensity that leaves the game playable. What I've done in World of Warcraft (for instance) is move some of the nastier color (only) encoding into text overlays on nameplates. Threat and "tagged" status, for instance. I would strongly suggest that there be a symbolic equivalent to ALL information that is also color coded - certainly a player selection of some sort (admittedly a symbol on the screen is less immersive than a color, but it is discernible to the colorblind).
2) Visual acuity - as the population ages, their eyesight fades. Beyond a certain point, correction is not possible. It would be very useful to have the ability to scale text upwards in size (within limits) and if you're not going to allow for UI modification, you should have a mechanism for doing it within the game settings. It's best if it's very context limited (very granular in which text is scaled) rather than an overall scale as much of the text isn't "tactical" in nature and time can be taken to cope with it other ways). Additionally, as age and life batters a person, sometimes the ability to translate from an arbitrary symbol to common meaning is reduced. Fifteen years in World of Warcraft and two strokes later I can't for the life of me attach the class/spec icons to their textual equivalents. Again, with UI modding, I was able (in that game) to create an overlay for the nameplates that stated, in text, the spec and class of the characters I was dealing with. Gating that sort of information behind things that are more difficult to access to an aging brain seems like a quite sort of agism to me and it would be a very good thing if something in the official UI allowed for textual information for any information currently intended to be presented solely as an icon.
3) Input versatility - thankfully I still have use of both of my hands, but my long-time GF who is also a gamer does not. She is limited to one hand and one foot. I have her set up with a mouse that has enough buttons on it to keep her happy and a foot pedal for a few other things - but given the "no macros" statement - I'm a little concerned that there might be a "nothing but a generic mouse and keyboard" rule going as well. That's going to be a problem for her as she literally cannot work both the mouse and the keyboard at the same time. Hopefully any limitation here is simply one of only allowing custom keybinding. We do not, by the way, hardware macro anything. WoW doesn't allow it and it hasn't been necessary for her play to do so. But we would need to be able to use, say, a Logitech G600 Mouse and an ADA foot treadle for an extra "key" provided they're all just mapped to keyboard keys or mouse functions.
I only just bought the basic pre-order package today so I haven't seen any of the insider stuff yet.
I am a retired IT professional with a long, long history in testing systems, so I look forward to participating in Beta2 if I can.
I greatly applaud everything I've seen about this game so far, and I'm not lobbying for a change in the restrictions you've placed on play. I am looking for some assurance that you're not setting this up to exclude the disabled (not something I think you'd do intentionally, but if you don't have an advocate speaking for them (us) it's something that could be done without intent).
Thank you.
7
Comments
Better to be part of the solution than just whine about problems, right?
I think you're good!
1. Steven is red-green colorblind himself, so he is acutely aware of the issue: Check the video here where he talks about it.
2. They are going to have a flexible UI built in, with scaling and such. Check out this part of a video.
3. I am fairly sure you're going to be ok with this as well. Their main rule is one button press, one action (or something like that). I play with one of those gaming keypads to the side of of the keyboard for ergonomic reasons and a multi-button mouse. I only touch the keyboard when typing. As long as windows recognizes the button push the same way it does a keyboard or mouse push, I can't see why it wouldn't work.
Yeah. everything we've done for my GF has been one click, one key stuff. It's just I was worried that you might look at the actual hardware at some point because it's NOT normal hardware other than the mouse.
I had her on a suck-n-puff for a while for some stuff too - but all of those ADA devices look like keyboards to Windows - you just set them up to register as specific keystrokes and fold them into your keybinds.