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Foxysen3 years ago
In one of my other games, I did something similar to what you suggested (rather than a menu, it was a grid of gameplay elements that could be navigated with mouse or keyboard), and a blind player ended up with focus unexpectedly moving around because they unknowingly had the mouse cursor over the playspace.

Thanks for sharing this experience, I actually didn't quite think it through. I will need to pay more attention to how other games do it. It still feels a bit off in Cloud Courier main menu for me personally but now I am not sure how exactly it should be.

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Cheeseness3 years ago(+1)

After having a poke around this morning, it looks like I've also worked on games with fairly large audiences that give focus to whatever the mouse has hovered over (such as Day of the Tentacle Remastered or Hand of Fate) and I don't recall anybody having trouble with those, so I don't think that any negative impact is likely to affect a wide range of people (that said, I haven't come across anybody who's had problems with the sort of thing I did here in Cloud Courier before either).

In the game where I had a blind user experience problems (the Bonesweeper prototype), I added an option to disable mouse input and set a couple of other blind-friendly settings all at once, but I think the broad conventions of keeping focus and hover as separate states for normal GUI widgets is important - in general, a lot more usability/accessibility research goes into general GUI toolkits and standalone applications than games, and that feels like a good lead to follow :D

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