By 
Right now, colourblind accessibility support in video games is, to put it lightly, inconsistent in its application. Sure, a lot of video games in theory offer support for colourblind players, but that support often ranges from lazy to actively unhelpful in execution, in no small part due to a lot of misunderstandings surrounding the needs of colourblind users.
At its worst, there’s a depressingly common mistake being made that not only doesn’t help colourblind users, but if anything runs counter to the aims of making your game more accessible.
Let’s start by discussing the most common approach taken by game developers looking to be more accessible for colourblind gamers, colourblindness filters. These are screen wide overlays which attempt to take a game which isn’t inherently colourblind accessible, and shift some of the colours on screen so that different groups of colourblind users can more effectively see the difference between different colours during gameplay.
Colourblindness filters are not an ideal solution for helping support colourblind players. They may help in some use cases for some colourblind gamers, but it’s important to understand their limitations if you’re going to implement them.
These screen overlay style filters can help make colours easier to differentiate for some colourblind players, but they do so by destroying the visual cohesiveness of your game’s art style, in ways which can often be actively unpleasant for players to look at. This is why many players who make use of colourblindness filters in games request that they be offered with sliders to customise the degree to which the filter is applied, so that they can find a balance between increased visual clarity and the degree to which the game’s look is altered.
Additionally, many colourblind players report that filters are less effective in fast paced real-time games, with their usefulness increased in genres like turn based games, where there is additional time available to determine differences between problem colours.
In an ideal world you would want to avoid having to offer colourblind players filters, either by making your game inherently colourblind friendly, offering players the ability to tweak individual element colours, or by offering alternatives to colour that communicate information such as alternative symbology.
If your aim is to make your game inherently colourblind friendly, you can start by making sure that your design incorporates colour choices that are able to be differentiated by a wide range of colourblind users. This can be achieved by checking that, for example, your colour choices maintain strong contrast ratios, differing in saturation and brightness in ways that help tell neighbouring elements apart without needing to accurately detect specific hues. You can use colourblindness simulators as a first step in checking your work, but should be working with colourblind individuals to confirm the success of your results.
Many games that offer customisable high contrast visual modes for low vision players will allow for customising the colour of elements such as enemies, allies, and collectable pickup highlights. This kind of approach can be applied to help colourblind players by allowing them to customise the colours of important game elements, and set them to colours that they can easily differenciate, and that look best to them. This approach is often more helpful than screen wide filters, as it gives control to the colourblind user to ensure that key elements are tailored to their specific needs and comfort while playing.
Lastly, by offering alternative symbology such as pattern effects, colourblind players can differentiate game elements without the need to see colour. A recent example of this was 2024’s Tekken 8, which offers an option to replace character models with patterned silhouettes for easier differentiation.
The above solutions can be used in combination, with the gold standard being communicating information in multiple forms at once where able.
Colourblindness filters can work in a pinch, but they’re certainly not the perfect fix solution some game developers treat them as, slapping them into games without thought for what other options they could be offering that might be more fundamentally useful for colourblind players.
However, there is one mistake that’s currently depressingly common in colourblindness filter design in games that developers need to be incredibly aware of, because it’s arguably the biggest mistake you can make in this area.
Let’s talk about developers accidently simulating colourblindness with filters rather than working to counter its effects.
As a person with strong colour vision, when working on visual design for things like video art assets, I will often make use of colourblindness simulation tools online. These allow me to upload an image, and see at a glance what the image might look like for people with various forms of colour blindness, to spot potential issues. It’s not a perfect solution, but it often works well as a first quick step in identifying issues in art design before checking the design with colourblind end users.
The issue is, some game developers attempting to create filters to help colourblind users differentiate colours more easily get confused along the way, and accidentally implement filters that simulate colourblindness rather than countering its effects. In essence, their colourblindness filters act like the tools I previously mentioned, causing non colourblind players to see the game through colourblind eyes, rather than offering support to colourblind players.
These filters for example might make red and green elements look the same to a non colourblind player, rather than shifting one of those two colours into a more detectable range for those who struggle to differentiate them.
Atomic Heart is a game that made this mistake in the summer of 2024, offering a colourblind filter set that simulated colour blindness types rather than countering their effects. To my knowledge, this has not been fixed in the six months since the issue first arose. If I am incorrect on that I appologise, that appears to be the case.
Atomic Heart is far from the only game to have made this mistake in recent months, it’s just an example I happened to have to hand of the issue. I don’t want to come across as having singled it out necessarily, a lot of games have done this, it’s just a useful example of something that has come up a lot as new development studios have started to try to take their first steps into supporting colourblind players.
Accidentally implementing a colourblindness simulation filter in place of a correction filter is one of those issues that, unfortunately, points at a wider issue we sometimes see arise in accessibility efforts in game design. It’s important to understand how a given accessibility feature works in practice, and test the feature with impacted users, to catch examples where you may have misunderstood a disability you don’t personally experience from an outside perspective.
Knowing on paper the commonly implemented features seen in other games is a great place to start on the road to accessible game design, but it’s important to also understand why those choices were made, and if those impacted feel there are better solutions available or pitfalls that you should be avoiding when supporting them as players.
While colourblind filters aren’t a one size fits all fix for colourblind accessibility in games, their presence is sometimes better than no support tools at all, if their limitations are understood by the developer. That said, if you’re going to attempt to use filters to support colourblind players, making sure you’re not accidentally simulating colour blindness rather than offering support for impacted players is hugely important. It’s more common than it should be, and is something we need to be careful to avoid as an industry moving forward.
By 
