Chris’ Corner: Color Accessibility

I’ve been a bit sucked into the game Balatro lately. Seriously. Tell me your strategies. I enjoy playing it equally as much lately as unwinding watching streamers play it on YouTube. Balatro has a handful of accessibility features. Stuff like slowing down or turning off animations and the like. I’m particularly interested one of the checkboxes below though:

“High Contrast Cards” is one of the options. It’s a nice option to have, but I find it particularly notable because of it’s popularity. You know those streamers I mentioned? The all seem to have this option turned on. Interesting how an “accessibility feature” actually seems to make the game better for everybody. As in, maybe the default should be reversed or just not there at all, with the high contrast version being just how it is.

It reminds me about how half of Americans, particularly the younger generation, prefer having closed captioning on TV some or all of the time. An accessibility feature that they just prefer.

Interestingly, the high contrast mode in Balatro mostly focuses on changing colors.

If you don’t suffer from any sort of colorblindness (like me? I think?) you’ll notice the clubs above are blue, which differentiates them from the spades which remain black. The hearts and clubs are slightly differentiated with the diamonds being a bit more orange than red.

Is that enough? It’s enough for many players preferring it, likely preventing accidentally playing a flush hand with the wrong suits, for example. But I can’t vouch for if it works for people with actual low vision or a type of color blindness, which is what I’d assume would be the main point of the feature. Andy Baio wrote a memorable post about colorblindness a few years ago called Chasing rainbows. There are some great examples in that post that highlight the particular type of colorblindness Andy has. Sometimes super different colors look a lot closer together than you’d expect, but still fairly distinct. Where sometimes two colors that are a bit different actually appear identical to Andy.

So maybe the Balatro colors are enough (lemme know!) or maybe they are not. I assume that’s why a lot of “high contrast” variations do more than color, they incorporate different patterns and whatnot. Which, fair enough, the playing cards of Balatro already do.

Let’s do a few more fun CSS and color related links to round out the week:

• Adam Argyle: A conic gradient diamond and okLCH — I’m always a little surprised at the trickery that conic gradients unlock. Whenever I think of them I’m like uhmmmmm color pickers and spinners I guess?
• Michelle Barker: Messing About with CSS Gradients — Layered gradients unlocking some interested effects and yet more trickery.
• Michelle Barker: Creating color palettes with the CSS color-mix() function — Sure, color-mix() is nice for a one-off where you’re trying to ensure contrast or build the perfect combo from an unknown other color, but it can also be the foundational tool for a system of colors.
• Keith Grant: Theme Machine — A nice take on going from choosing nice individual colors to crafting palettes, seeing them in action, and getting custom property output for CSS.