by Sevenless » Sun Nov 13, 2022 3:11 pm
I didn't want to soapbox this before, but I guess it's time I be honest.
I'm housebound disabled due to chronic migraine. Wide term, but they prefer wide terms medically lately. For me I have a migrain every minute of every day, and exposure to certain triggers causes severe attacks that often cause me to pass out. Flashing that doesn't bother most people is something I have to avoid, but flashing that bothers normal people is definitely going to ruin my day. I had to ask my custom client friend to make a tiny tweak to the base game that let me toggle the flashing effect off and that's all I needed to be able to play.
I'm an extreme case, one in 300,000 kind of disease, so I get that accommodating me isn't going to be high on the priority list. That said, usually anything that I find too bothersome to deal with healthy players also dislike but not enough that it's worth raising a fuss over. I'm kind of like a canary in a coal mine. All it takes is a UI toggle to make the game playable for me.
My wife is a controlled epileptic (no longer has seizures due to the medication she's on). Earlier loftar said to the effect that "epilepsy is overblown by the internet" with regards to trigger warnings and attempts to accommodate. And to be honest, kind of. See, people with really bad epilepsy will protect themselves by doing things like disabling autoplay on videos and sticking to media types that don't typically include flashes or strobing effects. Animal crossing lets plays for example are safe, haha 12yo funny memes not so much. Up until now, haven was very much a safe media option because of how the lighting is handled.
The thing that these overblowing "protect the world!" nutbags on the internet don't realize, is that controlled epilepsy is not immune to epileptic triggers nor do they immediately seize, it has a different effect. My wife when exposed to a flickering light in our apartment building will get nauseous and feel unwell for 10-20 minutes. A really bad exposure to a broken display screen a month ago had her unable to stand for 10 minutes due to nausea/wooziness, and then 3 more hours of feeling horrible. If she wasn't on medication, the light may or may not have made her have a seizure, the bad exposure definitely would have. So while they mean well, they still don't actually understand what people who are epileptic go through. And of course, they are usually horrible at identifying what exactly triggers epileptics (see tumblr's recent addiction to calling any lighting change "flashing").
It's just a toggle, and it would mean a lot to both of us. Or like As said, Accessible design where you know flashing lights can cause some players problems so you just think up alternatives. Like maybe making the game fade to grayscale, little visual artifacts moving around on the screen, there were a lot of alternatives that wouldn't have raised this issue. But the devs dismissing this when it was brought up... yeah it hurt. Where exactly do they expect the extremely, but not physically, disabled players to be? This game is ideal for soaking up hours when you have nothing but time that you desperately need to spend somehow. Even better that it's a game that gives you a "second life" to live when you can't have one IRL.
My wife has told me this is her last world because of the way the devs reacted to this. I'm heavily considering the same although for more than just that reason. Anyway soapbox over, and I guess I'm glad I had a place to say it.