Tekken 8 Accessibility Feature Turns Harmful

Recently, a tweet started circulating among the FGC about one of the accessibility features in Tekken 8, with the poster being surprised that such a high effort addition is not being talked about. Admittedly, many of us lack the kind of experience that players with colorblindness, low vision, or photosensitivity go through, so the post immediately garnered a lot of positive feedback.

However, Ian Hamilton, a staunch and passionate advocate for accessibility features in video games, has since pointed out just how harmful this feature might be. I will not show you the original tweet, for the fear of our readers experiencing the same issue, but I will include a small and dimmed picture of it for reference.

The original tweet mistakenly marks this as a colorblind accessibility feature, this is typically not the case because for one, the majority of colorblind does not mean lack of any color, and another big point is that filters are typically not a good solution to help colorblind people. It's far better to add secondary sources of information that do not rely on color, or to allow players to adjust UI and other colors to ones that would be easier for them top pick apart.

This filter specifically seems to be aimed more at people with low vision, as low vision accessibility typically aims to reduce the detail and color-spectrum to provide a lot of contrast that would be easy to pick up. However, doing it with the filter like in the video is still not ideal because rapidly moving stripe patterns can and have caused migraines for some of the photosensitive viewers who were sent or stumbled onto this tweet.

Tekken also has far better options that are more inline with industry standards, like the example you can see below. Although, it would ideally have more granular control and settings that you can see in something like Marvel's Spider-Man.

The game also has "actual" colorblindness presets, but the developers have mistakenly added filters that simulate colorblindness, rather than address it, which is a mistake that seems not all that uncommon.

While the viral tweet did end up causing issues for photosensitive people, hopefully the waves of constructive feedback and criticism that has been produced as a result will allow Tekken developers to fix these issues upon release, and if they don't, we'll let you know.