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Hi, I’m Yasmin. I’m legally blind (partially sighted, but it’s so bad I might as well be blind for most purposes). I don’t know how relevant this is to anyone here, but I wanted to share my thoughts on magic arena’s accessibility to me.
To start: the positives. Magic arena allowing us to enlarge cards is basically the only reason I can play it. Paper magic is almost impossible for me for this reason, unless I wanna get really bad headaches. But in magic arena, the text is enlarged so much that even I can make it out most of the time.
Another thing that matters a lot more than people might realize is magic arena’s dark menu background. If it were bright, or even medium-dark, it’d be so much harder for me to use. It’s a godsend how dark it is, because it reduces my eye strain, and the contrast makes it easier for me to find all the right buttons with relative ease.
Another aspect is just how automated it all is, and how everything has mostly distinctive audio cues, even if they’re silly sometimes. The more it minimizes my having to squint at details, the better. Special shoutout to the fact that card borders and colors change as necessary.
This may all seem obvious. These are just features of the program, yeah? But the combination of all these things is what makes it possible for me to play the game at all. For all its flaws, if Magic Arena didn’t exist, I simply would not get to have the game I love in my life, and I probably wouldn’t have met so many of my friends and loved ones. So I’m endlessly grateful to Arena for that.
It aint perfect, though; we all know that. Here are some ways I wish its visual accessibility would be improved.
Arena already has cards with so much text that we need to scroll to see it all. The card text can still sometimes be too small, even when zooming in on a card. It’d be great if Arena let us control the font size, and scroll through cards as needed.
It also upsets me that we can’t choose the battlefields we want to use. Battlefields like those of Kaladesh and Amonkhet are so bright, I often have to auto-concede when they’re assigned to me, because I just can’t make anything out and they make my eyes water. And let me tell you, I am not happy about ONE’s battlefield being the brightest by far—it means I just won’t be able to play limited for this set, which is very disappointing, and I’ll have to concede anytime the field comes up for any constructed format too.
It also galls me that we can’t turn off opponents’ card styles. I’m happy for anyone who uses them, and I enjoy lots of them myself, but the main way I can play magic without roping is if I can recognize the blurs of color as specific card artworks, and gods are there lots of card styles these days that are just incomprehensible to my eyes.
I doubt anything will be done about all this—the dev team seems so put-upon as is, with how many projects they’ve cancelled or delayed indefinitely over the years—and I don’t know if my demographic will ever be deemed worth catering to. But I can hope it reaches somebody with the power to change things.
Thanks for reading. In short, Magic Arena has a lot better to do as far as visual accessibility, but the features it currently has are why I can even play magic at all, and I hope people will take that into account. I know that, to many, “there’s no magic without the gathering.” But to people like me, magic might as well have never existed before arena. So I’ll always treasure it for that.
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