Skill bar: More friendly for people with deficiencies

[jlh]

I have a color vision deficiency called Deuteranomaly (more info) and I'm having troubles distinguishing the yellow and green part of the skill bars.  I do see that the two colors are different, but I need to look quite closely for this.  Here's an example image, where the Mining skill is trained a bit:



If you can tell the length of the green bar easily, then good for you, you're either a woman or not among the 6% that suffer this deficiency.  But given that this problem is quite common, I would suggest to darken the green color down a bit, as I did for the blacksmith skill, which I can see well.  (Even up to 10% of males are affected, depending on which figures you want to believe.  Women are usually not affected, because those lucky folks have two copies of the X chromosome and it's enough if one of them is intact.)

[Nikodemus]

what about if devs will make it definable in the xml, so that you can change it by yourself, as you wish?

Like there is:
        <color     r="0" g="50"  b="0" />
        <fadecolor r="40" g="210" b="20" />
for the two color bars

The skillbars would need 8 such definitions. Because there are 4 different bars and ech has separate color and the fadecolor.

[Zan]

I'm colorblind myself (this is a bad word by the way, since we can see all colors fine .. just have difficulties in overlapping areas) in that I can't really distinguish between certain shades of green and grey. I've never found any problems with gaming because of it, nor anywhere else in life really .. luckily enough. But the problem here is that this condition is different from individual to individual. You have a problem with this yellow/green while I see it without trouble but make the yellow into grey and I might have a much harder time.

So because of that I'd say the only real solution would be, like Nikodemus suggests, to allow the users to change the skillbar colors, just like the options for the chat colors.

Or more simply to make a clear black line appear where the green turns into yellow. You see that where the yellow/green goes over to red there is a clear border, a black line, where this is not the case on the other transition area.

[Kalika]

 

its strange how you never think of tehse things before

....

  ahahah i think the idea is great. not only does it help the players out but it could also make planeshift more diverse...not like exceptionally diverse but this way a person who has hard times on other games because of the colors could find something enjoyable here.


ehehhe maybe im being idealsitic...but i like the idea  

[miadon]

I have always thought a small pie chart diagram would be better than the straight bar. Instead of having bars for each skill on the page its basically one pie chart, when a skill is selected the pie chart is filled with the same information. As its lager it should be abit clearer for some people (well it should for some :\ )

badly drawn example(which looks like an african flag):

[jlh]

Thanks Nikodemus, that really helps a lot.  I wasn't aware that this can be configured, since it's not in the option dialog.
EDIT: Ha! Stupid me!    I found the xml you pasted in skillwindow.xml, which made me understand your comment in a sarcastic way, thinking it's already configurable.

I agree with Zan, color blindness comes in many variations and each would need different color settings to be suitable.  However, maybe the default could still be adapted to the most common deficiency, since it really is not rare (as opposed to most other types of color blindness).  A lot of people aren't even aware of their vision deficiency.

miadon, I think the bars are just fine, since they need horizontal space just like the skill name, giving quite optimal space usage.  The pie charts would need more vertical space and it's not easy to arrange them in a way that would not be more wastful with space than the current implementation.  (But while you're at it, you could question the entire system.  Why are skills half-trainable anyway?  That just leads to lots of clicks to train and a difficulty to see which bar is longer when the differences are smaller than one pixel.)

[miadon]

well I shuld make a better diagram(s) showing what I mean exactly as it wouldn't take up space (you just wouldn;t see all skills at once) anyway..

what do you mean half trainable? part of the training is gaining knowledge, the other part is practising what you learnt.?

[Nikodemus]

jlh, you can't do it with the skills bars.
You can do it with bars like HP mana, EXP, but if we want to have it for skills too, devs need to change few things.
Also the system will change soon and i mea the PPs. The theoretical and practical training parts will stay.

[jlh]

Nikodemus, yeah, just noticed, sorry.  (See edit of my post.)

miadon, for example you want to level up in a skill and need 10 PP to learn the theoretical part, before you can do the practical part.  What sense does it make that it's possible to only use up 5 PP and leave the theoretical part semi-trained?  The other thing is: I'm not high level in any skill yet, but if I will have to click on 'Train' 200 times to level from 20 to 21, then it's going to annoy me.    Not even talking about seeing how many PP I'd need then, since one PP in the blue part is then a sub-pixel unit.  But this is going off-topic now.

[Nikodemus]

try clicking 400 times ;P
You would bu suprised how PPs are critized and also on how much you need to click ot train nothing new.

[Marqsaynt]

A simple tip but, one that can make life just a little bit better. If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can use that instead of clicking a bazillion times.

I certainly like the idea of being able to modify certain things for people with color issues but, think that ideally it should actually be added as an option in the normal settings window for those of us who aren’t quite as computer savvy. Definitions... an xm-what-file? Fortunately for all of you here I am not colorblind so, you don't even have to try and explain it too me

This thread actually makes me wonder about options for people with other types of visual impairments. Is there already or is there planned something that could make the text larger or give one the ability to zoom in? Perhaps modern day computers are already equipped with things like this and I’m just not aware of it. Anyway, I’m just curious. 

[Bereror]

I guess we can make the green bar darker as you did on your screenshot. If that makes it easier to see, I don't have any problems with that.

[jlh]

This thread actually makes me wonder about options for people with other types of visual impairments. Is there already or is there planned something that could make the text larger or give one the ability to zoom in?

In the setup there's an option "Font scaling", where you can ajust font size.

Bereror, thanks! 

[Bereror]

How does this look?



This would be RGB=(0,80,0).

[miadon]

wouldn't it be clearer if it was just plain solid colours? perhaps have the option to turn such a feature on and off?