A jarring Tekken 8 colorblind filter is concerning accessibility experts

The developers of Tekken 8 are improving the upcoming game's accessibility with color blindness options, but some experts and users say some settings may cause more harm than good. One particular filter that displays horizontal and vertical black and white lines seems to cause headaches and dizziness, and may even "hospitalize players (or worse), like the famous Pokémon episode," said gaming accessibility specialist Ian Hamilton in a post on. (We have embedded an image of the game at the bottom of the article. Viewer discretion is advised.)

The different filters were posted by user X @itwhiffed, who said "why is no one talking about Tekken 8's colorblind accessibility." His thread shows multiple filters for red, green, and blue blindness, with different strength settings for each. However, a set of filters also displays characters as vertical and horizontal lines, with different white or black backgrounds.

"Accessibility friends, please stop directly sharing the tweet showing Tekken characters as striped lines," said James Berg, EA's senior general manager for accessibility. "Autoplaying video gives people migraines. Due to the parallel lines moving unpredictably, covering much of the screen, I would expect the situation to be worse as well." 

He added that "patterns of lines moving across a screen create a contiguous zone of high-frequency flashes, like an invisible strobe… (and) human meat engines are not big fans of it." This has been verified by some users on X, with one saying that the filter "Made me instantly dizzy just from a 2-3 second clip I saw accidentally." Tara Wake Voelker, accessibility manager at Xbox Game Studios, for her part, suggested The Tekken 8 team uses EA's Photosensitive Epilepsy Safety Testing Tool.

Katsuhiro Harada, director of Tekken responded to the outcrysaying "A few people, although very few, either misunderstood the accessibility options we were trying, or only saw the video without actually trying them in the demo." 

He added that the game offers "multiple types of color vision options" for colorblind players, not just a pattern, and that there is "a whole range of adjustment." He also noted that the feature received positive feedback from many demo participants.

"The intention here is fantastic: it's great to see Tekken becoming more accessible," » said Berg. "Please follow the advice in Ian and Tara's posts. We all want this to succeed." Harada and the Tekken 8 The team still has time to do so, as the game is scheduled to release on January 26.

A jarring colorblind filter in Tekken 8 concerns accessibility experts
Bandai Namco

This article was originally published on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/a-jarring-tekken-8-colorblind-filter-is-concerning-accessibility-experts-111534565.html?src=rss

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