LP Accessibility & Improvement

Hi, everyone. Can we discuss accessibility in the LP community and how to improve access for people with disabilities?

I’m hearing-impaired, so it’s often difficult for me to watch video let’s plays without proper subtitling/captioning. Google/YouTube’s automatic subtitles are terrible! However, there’s been some interest in having users submit subtitles to LP creators who then add it to the video as closed captioning. I know this isn’t ideal and is very time-consuming, so I was hoping to create some discussion about to improve the LP experience for people with hearing impairments.

If any of you are or know someone whose impairment effects their enjoyment of LPs, speak up and I hope we can brainstorm some solutions!

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This is a great idea for discussion. I know I forget pretty much constantly to support accessibility in whatever I do.

I have a question for folks with color blindness: I know playing some games can be difficult/impossible without color blindness modes; do you find that it impacts LP viewing to the same severity? Would there be anything to lose by just defaulting to the red/green color blindness setting if the game supports it? I know that probably doesn’t solve any issues for other color blindness types, though.

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I know with how few views I get I never expected to run into accessibility issues but I really should do captions anyway. Also mirroring the above really glad to have people discussing this.

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Okay kids, grab a chair and sit down cause I’m about to give you some info on being dyslexic and dyscalculia. While no two person with a learning disability is the same, there are little things that spread across the board on how it messes with us.

Talking about dyslexic side first I cannot stress the importances of font. You might be thinking…

“Grasslamb, it’s just letters on the screen. It can’t be THAT bad.”

Oh no no no, it’s pretty bad. I have a hard time telling the differences between an uppercase I and L depending on the font is used. For example in FF14 their a character named Ilberd but since the font used does not clearly distinguish if it’s an L or an I my brain goes “What the hell is this?” and I give up trying to figure out his name.

So if you’re doing a video LP with subtitles pick a font that makes letters is friendly for those who mix up. I suggest hitting up this site because it explains the subject in depth. https://bdatech.org/what-technology/typefaces-for-dyslexia/

Another thing to watch out for is spacing your information and how to present it. Sure, it’s easy to slap down the information in text on how to beat a boss but chances are if it’s not worded right or or Dyslexic hobgoblin decides to mess with you today then that point you’re trying to make is going to be lost to the eather. If you need to explain something, try adding in pictures, breaking down the information into smaller bits, or just simplify it. Kinda like this…


HOW TO BEAT BOSSMAN
[Rad picture of you fighting Bossman or video]
-To beat Bossman normally you need the Sword of Stabby Stab equipped. Keeping on hitting him until he dies. Hooray!
[Another picture of you fighting Bossman or video with an alt method]
-Their are other methods of beating Bossman is to use a glitch to make him fuse into the wall and die.

But you all get the point. Make it clean, simple, and not a cluttered mess of information.

As for dyscalculia, just no. Don’t do it bro. Don’t put in complex equations or numbers in it unless it’s vital.

That’s it for now! Feel free to ask me anything!

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Thanks for the input, @Grasslamb! I often have trouble with certain fonts too, and your points on formatting are interesting to consider.

@TattersMatters I asked a friend of mine with color blindness about his experiences with video let’s plays. He says that there’s a lot of great applications for people with color blindness to view content online (which don’t necessarily play well with video games, hence the separate color blindness modes) and that most of the people in the community use these applications on a daily basis. YouTube actually works fairly well with it and has some basic compatibility on their side.

Of course, he’s not the end all be all expert on color blindness, but I thought it’d be an interesting perspective to bring in. (And I’ve extended an invitation to join LP Zone, so hopefully he’ll swing by and elaborate!)

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I was wondering does the way this post is formatted help at all or is it still difficult? Trying to work on spacing to accommodate You See That Wall? You Can Go Through It - Let's Play Rainbow Six Siege.

I have mild red-green colour-blindness, so feel free to ask me questions.

I can’t think of any particular LP I’ve watched/read where my colour-blindness has caused me problems. In games it has caused problems, especially where twitch reflexes are involved. A couple examples I can think of are for match 3 puzzle games (Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes has some terrible colour pallets for a few factions), or in an FPS where the crosshair turns red or green depending on if you’re aiming at an enemy or ally. In LPs, I usually don’t pay as much attention to that, and infer the colours based on if something happened, or didn’t as the case may be.

As far as turning on a colour-blind mode in a game, I’d generally default to turning it on, unless you have a good reason not to. If a game implements it badly and it ruins the aesthetic, then don’t, but for something like FTL, I can’t think of a reason to not use it.

I’m not sure what can more generally be done, since this is pretty game dependent, as opposed to some of the things @Grasslamb mentioned, like font choices or image pacing, but feel free to bounce ideas off of me.

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So I have a serious question regarding subs and hearing-impaired viewers. Does youtube allow you to move the captions that appear, or are they always on the bottom of the video? I ask because I was thinking about what you would have to do to make a video with more than one person doing commentary even remotely watchable. Like, to use one of my LR videos as an example, here are a few of the concerns I came up with:

  • Can you immediately tell whether me, Fedule, or a guest is talking?
  • Is it blocking the actual in-game subtitles?
  • Assuming the above is okay, is it blocking anything else important? Part of the UI, the map, anything in the combat, etc.
  • How would you handle vocal tics, interruptions, emphasis, inflections, etc?

It just does not seem feasible without producing them myself and baking them into the video, which is a monumental amount of work for what would ultimately be very little payoff and probably wouldn’t be aesthetically pleasing to anyone. Which, I’m sure that’s not really the point of doing something like this, but speaking as a creator, I would want them to look like they belonged there, rather than being haphazardly placed by youtube or whatever.

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