The month-end screen in Business Baron shows a bank balance, a thirteen week forecast, four figures that have moved since last month and a letter from somebody who wants something. On a bad month, three of those numbers are red. On a very bad month a player has about fifteen seconds of attention before they stop reading and just press the button.
Dense games are the ones where accessibility stops being a checklist and becomes the difference between a game somebody plays and a game somebody gives up on in the second hour.
Contrast is measured, not judged by eye
Every colour pairing in the interface is measured against the text it carries. Body text meets a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background. Large text and the non-text parts of controls, borders, focus rings, the outlines of charts, meet at least 3 to 1. Those are the WCAG 2.2 AA thresholds and we treat them as a floor rather than a target.
The important word is measured. Designers are bad judges of contrast because designers look at their own work on a good monitor in a room with the curtains shut. So we do not judge it. We sample the actual rendered colours, through the actual stack of layers behind them, and read the ratio off.
That sweep caught a class of fault we would never have found by looking. The game is lacquer navy, but its stylesheet had been written when the surfaces were parchment, and the inks that suited paper were still being applied on top of the dark ground in places. One of them measured 2.4 to 1 on the navy. It looked fine. It was not fine.
We have not yet got that check running automatically on every build, and we are not going to claim we have. It is a sweep we run deliberately, and putting it in the pipeline is on the list.
Colour never carries the meaning on its own
A red number is a convention, not information. Somewhere between 1 in 12 and 1 in 20 men have some form of colour vision deficiency, and the red and green pairing that most finance interfaces reach for first is the exact pairing that fails for the commonest kind.
So nothing in our interface means anything by colour alone. A negative figure is in brackets and carries a minus sign. A deteriorating trend has an arrow with a direction. A warning has a word next to it. A chart series has a distinct dash pattern or marker shape as well as a distinct hue, and the legend repeats the shape rather than only the swatch.
Colour still does work, because it is fast and it is useful. It simply never does the work by itself. If you printed one of our screens in black and white it would still tell you which way the business was going.
Every screen has a keyboard route through it
You can play the whole game with a keyboard. Not "most of it" and not "the main loop". Every screen, every dialogue, every table, the map, the letter tray, the research tree, the hiring flow.
That means a defined tab order that follows the reading order rather than the order the elements happened to be created in. It means a focus indicator that is always visible and always meets the 3 to 1 rule against whatever is behind it, including on top of a chart. It means no keyboard traps, so anything you can tab into you can tab out of, and Escape reliably closes the thing in front of you rather than sometimes closing two things.
There are shortcuts for the things you do constantly rather than occasionally. M opens the menu. The space bar pauses the clock. Ctrl or Cmd with K opens the search, and the arrow keys move through what it finds. Nothing in the game is a decision under time pressure: the clock can always be paused, and it stops by itself when something urgent arrives.
Where we are honest about being behind is deep table navigation. A financial game is mostly tables, and moving through a long one a cell at a time with the arrow keys is the right behaviour. Today you tab. It works, and on a forty row table it is tedious, and that is a fair criticism rather than one we would argue with.
Screen reader users get labelled regions and headings in a sensible order. Letters are read as articles with their sender and subject. Decisions are labelled buttons rather than clickable divs. Any image you bring into the game yourself can carry your own alt text.
Text size is a setting, not a zoom control
Zooming a fixed layout makes the text bigger and the screen smaller, and in a game full of tables that trade is a bad one. So the interface is built in relative units and reflows. There is a text size setting with several steps, and at the largest step the layouts rearrange rather than clipping or scrolling horizontally.
That constrained how we designed. Tables cannot rely on ten columns always fitting, so columns have priorities and the low priority ones collapse into an expandable row. Labels cannot be written assuming they get one line. Every number has an abbreviated form for narrow layouts that never loses a significant digit.
Building it this way was more work than a fixed 1920 by 1080 layout and it is the reason the game is usable on a laptop at all.
Motion is optional because motion is information
The game animates the passing of a month, the arrival of a letter, and the movement of a figure when it changes. That motion is doing a job: it tells you what has just changed on a screen with a lot on it.
It can also make people ill. Vestibular disorders are common and parallax, large sweeping transitions and anything that moves a big area of the screen are the usual causes. We respect the operating system reduced motion preference, and there is a separate in-game control for people whose system setting is not what they want here.
With reduced motion on, nothing is lost. The transitions become cross fades or simply cuts, and the information the movement was carrying is carried instead by a change highlight that appears and fades. The design rule is that no animation may be the only way a change is communicated, which is the same rule as the one about colour, applied to time instead.
Why we care about this
A simulation of running a business is a reading game. If the reading is hard, the game is not difficult, it is just hard to see, and those are not the same thing and only one of them is interesting. We would rather ship a game where the challenge is the bank balance in February than one where the challenge is a 3.8 to 1 contrast ratio on a number you needed.