I Can See Paradise
Approximately 8% of men and 2% of women have some form of color vision deficiency, making it among the most common of all disabilities. Thankfully, in most situations, it’s also one of the most harmless. That is of course, until you’re trying to right click an ethereal Io and have no idea that the darn glowing orb has a color modifier active to signify it’s used a Ghost Scepter!
Color vision deficiencies can have a huge impact on players’ gaming experience, as color is often used to signify important characteristics of things in games. This is true in Dota 2, and the importance of this can even be seen with changes like the recent Spring Cleaning update.
At STRATZ, we’ve tried to be careful to avoid displaying content that depends on accurate color vision to be visible. While we think we’ve largely achieved this goal, a recent deep dive into our approach with charts helped us to uncover [among other things] that we haven’t always achieved that goal. We hope our release today brings greater contrast and clarity to those who had been underserved by our three existing theme options.
Since the Colorblind Mode is an extension of your themes, we’ve added the controls for it to both your settings dropdown and to your settings page.
On many pages, the changes seen in Colorblind Mode are obvious. However, most of the graphics around the site are unchanged. This is by design, to ensure that the experience is in-sync with the client. Furthermore, as far as we know, the graphics themselves don’t suffer from major identification concerns stemming from their use of color. Here’s a broader view of how these new changes may impact your or your fellow players’ experience:
It can be difficult for individuals with ordinary attributes to understand how much of an improvement small changes can make for those who are affected by their differences. Whether it be the width of a plane seat for heavier individuals, the height of doors for taller individuals, or the color of the win rate chart for color vision deficient individuals, all of us encounter challenges unique to us at some point. We hope this new color mode will help some of you overcome the challenges you face while viewing your content on STRATZ, while at the same time making the experience more vibrant all around.
And of course as always, if you notice ways we can improve this new mode, let us know on Discord!
We were glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife
P.s. Remember that major announcement we teased late last year? And then again last week? Well…get ready; it’s coming sooner than you think! 🎺 🛤 🎺
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Did you miss our last Supdate? Come explore your new hero streaks and lane analysis pages!
See you soon!
