I appreciate articles like these, Mandl. Insightful!
I can say from experience that sending something to that email address will usually get you a reply, but not a fix. A bunch of visual accessibility issues that I've reported at the starting of Shadowlands are still not fixed. This includes: Flickering after completing Spires of Ascension, wings clipping into your screen that fight, the extreme brightness in Bastion zones and Spires, and puddles that are nearly invisible such as sanguine in the mists maze. This is ofc not everything I reported, but that email address seems rather futile to use.
Accessibility stuff like this is a bit of a weird situation because it's so hard for folks like me to think about it from the perspective of someone who physically cannot do the mechanic as intended, but it kinda makes sense when you use other contexts to support it (and that's what this very good article did well, in my opinion). I don't think I've ever had a problem with Hylbrande as a boss; the mechanic itself is a bit weird, but no group I've been in has struggled with it. There's a WeakAura to solve it, if I'm in voice it's easily communicated to me, and I can easily just type in chat "blue, yellow, purple, orange" and from there it'll easily be sorted out if I'm not using either of those two solutions. But that's because I'm not visually-impaired to that degree; I need glasses to see well, sure, but I can still see things clearly with my glasses. I can't just put on a blindfold and replicate how I approach Hylbrande, or Mekkatorque, or any similar fight like that either because that doesn't come close to replicating how a person with a disability and whose body adjusted to that disability over years, even decades, "views" the world. So when I think about it like that, I'm like "yeah, that definitely sounds hard, but... how do you even begin to account for that?"So thinking about it like that, I kinda don't like Mekkatorque-esque fights. Mekkatorque was obviously much more problematic since even not using comms on that fight could become a massive trainwreck, but even a fight like this, that I don't have any trouble doing at even pretty high key levels, has some clear issues when presented this way from/for the perspective of someone who's very visually-impaired. And it's nice that WoW's always at the absolute top of their game when it comes to accessibility (it ain't perfect, but it's leagues better than the vast majority of games on the market); I genuinely wouldn't have ever considered this an issue from my own perspective because it's not a problem I personally have to deal with, but it's clear both that it's an issue and why it's an issue.
Oh, actually good read here. Interesting to think about.Personally, I prefer when the complexity is more in the class and rotations/priorities than the encounters. I don't mean make things easy, just re-balance where the difficulty actually is and what requires your focus to be a bit more even. They already offer some "simple options" in the new talent trees for those who want that playstyle, and It's probably much easier to solve accessibility options there with interface options than it is to make a custom solution for every complicated encounter.
I actually like fights that require a bit more team coordination/communication, but it is something that belongs in higher end/coordinated group content. I can see that doing stuff like that in pugs or with people not familiar enough with the encounters and/or people who are physically not be able play those encounters are really held back and I am glad that Blizzard fixes stuff like that as well.
As a player with a minor physical disablement that can play games well (not perfect just because I suck, I'm not playing the disabled card here) it's actually encouraging to see them address accessibility aspects in the game. This change is almost entirely aimed at the blind community. First off, they're absolute bosses for playing the game blind anyway, and designs like this can be demotivating if there's simply no fix to the issue. If anything, thinking about visual accessibility even to sighted players is a good thing, as I'm much more sound than visual prone.
I'm glad they've realized randomly picking people to do critical pass/fail tasks in an encounter is a bad idea. As a friends and family style guild, we always have a few people who for various reasons can't do the more difficult mechanics in a fast enough time frame. Also, when you have to use an addon to do an encounter, you've designed it poorly. Anyone remember that toss the orb to everyone in a split second raid fight? I forget the boss name, but that one was worse than Mekka to get through for us. I liked Fatescribe because you got to designate who did the rings. We'd still mess up at times, but it was a lot more doable than if they were randomly assigned. I just hope they remember this going forward instead of their usual forgetting all wisdom in the next expansion.