New Colorblind Support in Patch 6.1

In World of Warcraft patch 6.1, you’ll find a new user interface system that we’ve designed to assist players who have common visual issues related to colorblindness.

In the new ‘Accessibility’ interface configuration section, you’ll be able to enable both text and color enhancements that may improve your visual experience while playing WoW. ‘Enable UI Colorblind Mode’ (which was previously in the Help section) is now here. These text enhancements add certain words and phrases to the tooltips throughout the game—tooltips that, by default, use different colors to indicate useful information about objects, NPCs, and other players.

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. 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.

The game will now have three sets of colorblind filters to choose from: protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia.

These are designed to assist players who have one of the three types of dichromacy, and should be useful to those who have one of the three kinds of anomalous trichromacy: protanomaly, deuteranomaly, and tritanomaly. Each set of color adjustments is available via a handy dropdown selector, and each comes with a ‘strength’ slider. The farther to the right you set the slider, the more the game removes potentially problematic wavelengths of color for each type.

To learn more about color vision deficiencies, check out the Wikipedia article on “Color blindness”. You can find a number of resources and free online color vision tests at colorvisiontesting.com.

For more information on the 6.1 public test realm, including instructions you can follow to test patch 6.1 with us, take a look at our PTR customer support article. You can also join the discussion in our PTR discussion and PTR bug report forums.