Breaking Down Accessibility: Bloom, Brightness, and Motion Blur

Over the past year, I have noticed a trend in games that brought me to an interesting accessibility concern. Whether your game is pushing for realistic or intense graphics like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor or you’re focusing on colorful, stylistic, or cel-shaded visuals like Tears of the Kingdom there is something you should keep in mind. Visual accessibility goes beyond colorblind options and options for epileptic people.

The first thing I noticed whilst playing Jedi: Survivor, is that there are moments where the bloom is exceedingly high. Coming out of certain caves or dark areas almost blinds you when you emerge in the sunlight. While this makes for a realistic transition, it can also be troubling for people who are sensitive to bright white sections.

In fact, there are games that use a black-and-white aesthetic that suffer from this same accessibility problem, such as games like Blanc or Crime O’Clock (which hasn’t been released yet). These predominantly white games would be an express trip to migraine town for me. This also becomes a problem for games with high bloom settings, most specifically when you deal with snowy environments.

I always talk about how I prefer games that use a “grey-toned” white for their snow. Most people probably don’t think much about it, but in the real world, people can get something called Snow Blindness. Snow Blindness is a disorder that comes from exposure to the sun reflecting off white snow. Game developers often try to emulate this behavior of snow, making the snow a bright white so that the in-game sunlight will make it seem brighter.

While working on a review for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (which I haven’t yet finished) I noticed that the bloom was high in this game as well. This normally can be resolved by simply adjusting your brightness settings as you play, so that dark caves are less dark, and bright areas are less bright. However, aside from the opening option to adjust the brightness, Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t allow you to adjust brightness settings.

Of course, people could tell me that I should adjust the brightness of my television or Nintendo Switch, but that is beside the point. Games should allow you to adjust these things at any time because you never know for certain if the brightness settings you set at the beginning are going to be accurate to your needs or not. For someone that is prone to migraines, prolonged periods of time in snowy areas with high bloom settings can be a problem without brightness adjustments.

There have been several games that I have played over the years that I stopped playing because I got to a snowy biome and couldn’t progress. Usually, games with grey-toned snow don’t have this problem because the sunlight doesn’t cause them to glow and be overly bright. While I respect people wanting more realistic visuals, or at least visuals that have realistic elements to them, I think people who are prone to eye strain or migraines would benefit from consideration here.

This is especially the case with handheld consoles like the Nintendo Switch because you will likely have it closer to your face if you are playing in handheld mode. Elements such as MotionBlur also can be a problem in this situation because people who get motion sick or suffer from headaches due to fast motion can have problems with it. When I have the option, I usually turn off Motion Blur before I ever start a game. I know it is something that triggers headaches or nausea for me, so it just makes sense to eliminate it at the start.

I see these visual accessibility issues more frequently in Indie games, and I understand that independent developers are running on a smaller budget. However, having certain options in an options menu (beyond volume sliders) will help more people be able to play your games. Brightness is a good thing to start with because it causes more barriers than you’d expect.

I was surprised that for a game as involved as Tears of the Kingdom, the visual accessibility was so limited. There is an option in the game to make text have a background to it, however, the background is transparent, so sometimes the text is still hard to read. This isn’t just a Tears of the Kingdom problem though, sometimes I see games release that don’t consider some of these simple elements that can cause larger issues.

Overall, while things like colorblind options and options to remove flashing lights are very important, it is still good to be aware of other ways games can be made more visually accessible. Jedi: Survivor has a host of options and I respect that, but there are games that don’t have this attention to accessibility. We have come a long way in the last few years, but there is still more to be done.