Diegetic Guidance: Yellow Paint as an accessibility tool for players with reduced visibility

Abstract

The global video game sector, despite its advances toward photorealism, faces the challenge of including players with reduced visibility. These users often struggle to distinguish interactive elements in complex environments, resulting in limited experience and subsequent frustration. We address this issue by developing and evaluating a functional prototype in Unreal Engine 5 that utilizes yellow paint as a diegetic visual aid to optimize accessibility. Furthermore, we empirically validate this technique as a balance between low cost and strong immersive integration, thereby filling a gap in the literature that traditionally focuses on HUD-based or hardware solutions. For the research, the prototype recreates a soft-horror 3D environment where key elements were highlighted using the yellow paint. The methodology focused on rigorous usability tests with participants who presented a combination of myopia, astigmatism, and color blindness. This approach allowed for a precise measurement of the visual guide's effectiveness through predefined test cases, achieving an overall success rate of 65.91% in task completion. Consequently, yellow paint is established as a viable and relevant resource for strengthening accessibility without sacrificing player immersion, and, on a theoretical level, it offers a significant contribution to the design of more inclusive video games.