World of Warcraft Accessibility menu to provide options for colour blind players

World of Warcraft is soon to be host to a very welcome new set of menu options.

Colour vision issues are very common and can cause havoc for gamers when UI designers rely heavily on colour to convey information like friend or foe status, item type and danger levels.

The next World of Warcraft patch acknowledges this problem, and will introduce an Accessibility menu to the interface configuration menu.

According to a Battle.net post, Blizzard will be implementing three sets of filters designed to assist players with various forms of protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia.

"Each set of colour adjustments is available via a handy dropdown selector, and each comes with a ‘strength’ slider. The farther to the right you set the slider, the more the game removes potentially problematic wavelengths of colour for each type," Blizzard said.

Players will also be able to switch on tooltips to assist with various otherwise colour-dependent information.

"For example, when you move your mouse cursor over a piece of rare gear and then a piece of epic gear, the game colours the names of the items blue and then purple, respectively. With ‘UI Colourblind Mode’ enabled, the game will add the words 'Rare' and 'Epic' to the tooltips for those items," Blizzard said.

"For players who find it difficult to discern between friendly, neutral, or hostile targets, additional indication text in the tooltip will now appear when you move your mouse cursor over other characters."

This is really great news; thoughtful colour options can make all the difference, and implementing them is one of the easiest things a developer can do to make a game more accessible.

Thanks, Polygon.