widelands-dev team mailing list archive

[Holger Rapp <HolgerRapp@xxxxxxx>]

On 17.07.2013, at 04:50, Teppo Maenpaa <teppo.maenpaa@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 10:15:30PM +0200, Holger Rapp wrote:
> 
>> What you are proposing uses color as the only way to convey information. This is bad for a number of reasons, the first that it is abstract (in the sense that a code must be understood) and the most important is that color impaired people do not get this information at all - a significant portion of the population is color blind or impaired, up to 10% of the male population has red-green deficiencies. So this is a no go.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Thank you for pointing that out. The color blindness issue can be made go away by making the brightnesses sufficiently different. Could you name another of the number of reasons?
No, I do not think you are correct here. There is so much difference in the way people can or cannot perceive color. Brightness doesn't seem to be easily order-able for a human and the differences are harder to perceive. I used to think the same till I regularly gave slides for my presentations to a red-green deficient colleague of mine. And it was really hard to predict what he could or could not distinguish. So making color the only conveyor of information is hard to get right. I would like to defer to experts in this matter for more argumentations of this point. My take away from my experience is: it is hard to predict what people will or will not see and relying on color alone is poor design and a conscious decisions to exclude some people from this information.
http://designshack.net/articles/accessibility/tips-for-designing-for-colorblind-users/
http://webdesign.about.com/od/accessibility/a/aa062804.htm
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1498669/gui-design-for-color-blindness


>> I am also not sure - UI is not easy to get right. I can only say that only using colors is the easy way out and definitively a wrong approach.
> 
> If we do not reach agreement here, the worst that can happen is flame wars.
We do not do flame wars here - people voice their opinion and then we make a decision and move forward. Flame wars haven't been a big problem for Widelands in a long time :).

> The second-worst I can think of is postponing the whole thing to a future release, which would already be just fine.
I do not think this is really related - we include the feature when its done and it either will or will not make the next release. Nothing to worry about, Widelands will continue to improve.

I wanted to add some more constructive discussion to the suggestion. For me this idea gives us the chance to consolidate the information we currently have in the game. For example for workers we show "vacant" and "missing" next to them to is the building window - this suggestion can allow us to do the same for wares. The information is slightly different than what we have for workers, because a ware might be "coming" but because of traffic never arrive. I am not too fond of using colors at all to convey this information - I remember dimly that the settlers II alpha also used colored text over the buildings, but it got removed in the release, I can see us finding as well that the colors are too noisy and take away from the homogeneity we currently have. Instead, I suggest adding "status panes" to the building statistics - small pictures (maybe 10x10 pixel) that show the status of the building. Wares missing, Workers missing, Building stopped and so on could all be such panes and they are displayed hovering over the building or in the tooltip. Opening the status window for the building would allow the player to immediately learn what the icons mean - because a verbal form of the status is displayed there and (maybe) the icons are also listed next to each other in bigger - to be easier seen. 

Isn't this a cleaner approach that could scale better to other information than using colors?

Cheers,
Holger