Oct 2024: Designing Primrows for Accessibility

Accessibility settings are great, but you know what’s one step better?  When accessibility is always on, baked into the design of a game from the start.  Nobody wants to have to stop the tutorial during the first step to go frantically searching for accessibility features.

Since the flowers are the most important elements of the Primrows game board, our goal from the beginning was to come up with a set of flowers whose colors and shapes would remain distinct for as wide a range of vision accessibility needs as possible.

But I’ve already gotten ahead of myself here, because the choice to use flowers was in itself an accessibility choice.

Here’s a re-creation of the very first prototype for the game that would evolve into Primrows 2010, which leaned heavily on the game’s Sudoku roots:

A perfectly utilitarian option, but beyond just lacking character, it demands a certain level of literacy.  And even though you aren’t doing any actual calculations with these numbers in Primrows (or in Sudoku, for that matter), a lot of people with discalculia or a general aversion to math find this style to be its own barrier to entry.  Abandoning this design turned out to be the right call for several reasons.

(And for those people who do find numbers to be the best way to distinguish the different flowers, we incorporated the numbers one through five in the design of the flowers.  Can you spot them?)

Since we knew relying on color alone to distinguish flowers wasn’t going to be an option, Susan made sure all the shapes of the flower had as much shape contrast as possible -- some tall, some wide, some round, some pointy.  Among other things, the suits of a deck of playing cards served as a bit of inspiration.

During this phase, Cathy spent a good amount of time looking at her monitor with her glasses off at various distances — and once we had a final design, we made sure to seek out playtesters with low vision to check our work.

Choosing the colors took a lot of effort, and we spent a lot of time looking at different color options in color blindness simulators to try and find a set of colors that had contrast across a wide range of color vision deficiencies, while still maintaining stylistic consistency.  On the left is an early color palette, and on the right is the revised version that made it into the final version.

Of course, simulators are no substitute for testing accessibility with real humans, so we made efforts to recruit playtesters with various types of colorblindness.  These tests are what revealed to us that, while players were able to distinguish the different types of flower from each other, there were some issues distinguishing the flowers from the game board, and we needed at least a little bit of a shadow behind the flowers to help players out.

In addition to what we’ve done with the flowers, we’ve also been using tools to ensure our UI elements meet minimum contrast requirements -- and I haven’t even touched on the things we took into consideration for motor accessibility, or the way every sound in the game has a companion animation cue.

We do hope our efforts have contributed to a game that most people will be able to enjoy!