Ars Technica have a good article about Color-blindness and video game. This is an issue that most of the developer ignore and is part of how to create good user interface (which i’m quite interested in these days).
Developers should always use color as secondary information (the same for sounds for handled games but for other reasons) because this is not a reliable information for some people. We can say this is a comfort information.
The form and position should be used as primary information.
From my experience, the worst is that developers already know about this issue, color blind or not. So why games still have this problem? Because there is no reminder during the production, because there is no guidelines and mainly no time to care.
Nic Magnier. Previously game developer on several unreleased video games. Ironically I work now at Nintendo of Europe to help developers to release their own titles.
April 16th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
And what happens when you don’t care? This: http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/04/15/funny-pictures-color-blind-cat-can-never-win/ and we surely do not want that…