The upcoming World of Warcraft 6.1 patch will make life a little easier for colorblind gamers through the addition of three colorblind filters—protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia—and a "UI Colorblind mode" that adds relevant words and phrases to tooltips.
"For example, when you move your mouse cursor over a piece of rare gear and then a piece of epic gear, the game colors the names of the items blue and then purple, respectively," Blizzard wrote in today's announcement. "With 'UI Colorblind Mode' enabled, the game will add the words 'Rare' and 'Epic' to the tooltips for those items. For players who find it difficult to discern between friendly, neutral, or hostile targets, additional indication text in the tooltip will now appear when you move your mouse cursor over other characters."
Blizzard said the filters will assist players with one of the three types of dichromacy, and "should be useful" to those with anomalous trichromacy.
Videogames commonly make use of colored text to indicate an item's particular properties or importance, which is fine as long as you can see those colors. But if you can't, it's a real problem, and so it's good to see Blizzard doing something about it. The World of Warcraft 6.1 patch is currently being put through its paces on the Public Test Realm.
