[1878] Let users override or disable custom profile themes for accessibility
tracked
Fusl
The new profile themes allow users to choose arbitrary colors for text, buttons, icons, and backgrounds. Some combinations can make functional UI difficult or impossible to read, for example, white text on a bright yellow button.
This is primarily a readability and visual-comfort issue. Poor contrast can affect users with low vision, color-vision deficiencies, migraines, light sensitivity, or other visual-processing difficulties. It can also be especially uncomfortable in VR headsets.
Please add an accessibility option that lets viewers override custom profile themes with VRChat's default colors. Ideally, this would include a global toggle to show/hide custom profile themes, automatic use of default colors when a high-contrast accessibility mode is enabled, or contrast validation in the theme editor to prevent unreadable combinations.
Profile customization is a nice form of self-expression, but the viewer's accessibility and readability preferences should take priority over another user's theme.
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「Jаy」
Just saw the new nameplates/profile icons on the website because I think a dev made an oopsie and forgot to turn them off, which I assume will be added later, forcing them on everyone without even offering a way to disable them is a baffling decision.
Fusl
For reference, this is what 「Jаy」 is talking about.
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〘Awooo〙
Tupper - VRChat Head of Community If that is direction we are taking. Might as well just slap on Ad's everywhere and call it job well done.
kazin138
"You can have any color you want, so long as it's animated flashing rainbows."
Great.
ColonelPannick
Pretty obvious VRC is not going to make any of the dumb crap you're selling disable-able. Maybe you can sell us vrc+++ and allow that? Love to see the annoying, intrusive and overly flashy leave animations go away too. Maybe after one gives someone a seizure. It's as visually irritating as the particle spam cannons.
Tupper - VRChat Head of Community
updated the status to
tracked
We're not going to add a setting that forces default colors or turns off other people's profile decorations.
However, we do agree agree that the readability problem underneath the request exists and is actionable. Some color combinations make buttons and text genuinely hard to read.
We're looking at improving contrast specifically where the buttons live in the profile, so the functional parts stay legible no matter what colors they picked.
Fusl
Tupper - VRChat Head of Community VRChat has designed the main menu user profiles to look awfully close to Discord's user profiles, either purposely or by accident, whereas Discord at least has accessibility options to disable these effects.
VRChat users purchase avatars all the time, either on Booth, Gumroad, or even on VRChat, and the viewer can decide to hide those avatars, even decide whether to hide the avatar globally or just hide this specific user's avatar, nobody gets upset. But we can't have the same thing for profile animations?
That said, my biggest concern about profile customizations is, like you said, contrast on buttons. Here's a screenshot of a worst case scenario (white on yellow) that I personally would like to see addressed, but even in a slightly better scenario shown in the second screenshot where someone themed their profile with decent colors, some of the buttons still become barely readable.
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「Jаy」
Fusl Tupper - VRChat Head of Community Couldn't of have said it better.
We can disable Avatars, stickers, emoji's, etc. whom are all bought, We can disable group banners, status, size, anything to improve the users experience or customize their experience to how they want it, except for paid cosmetics. I get they want to promote and incentivize people to buy nameplates to turn a profit, but this is absolutely not the way to do it by forcing this upon people.
At least give users the option to default nameplates to neutral gray color instead of forcing users to look at it and not force users to play with nameplates off just for a few extra bucks.
I don't like the direction VRChat is going anymore and I think this might be one of the updates that will push me to a new platform at one point.
Kodfod
Tupper - VRChat Head of Community This makes no sense. You let us disable/hide everything else a user does, but this is where you draw the line? What benefit do you gain from disallowing people the ability to customize their own local menu experience? UX accessibility should be priority and if a user can not process info due to decorations, there should be a way to accommodate them.
It's fine to have the customizations, but let us control what we see.
Whaddageek
Tupper - VRChat Head of Community It's not just a question of "readability", it's that you've made a UI that anyone photosensitive fundamentally can't use because any profile is now rolling the dice on a migraine, or worse; a SEIZURE. And players have to look at them for anything from friending to blocking someone because of the new UI.
Especially with the purchased profile sets all being STROBING COLOUR PATTERNS.
Even just opening the menu engages everyone's profile animations in their player tags, so just being in a large-pop instance is actively harmful as well.
There is zero reason to force people to look at the profile effects, because if they weren't gonna (or can't) look at them by choice, forcing them is just a net negative for your playerbase. It is a fundamental failure in general accessibility, and an active health risk to a portion of your playerbase that that Safety System was made for to protect and should include a toggle for this as well.
Dor․
"Reduce Menu Animations" was added, and while it's a step in the right direction to reduce clutter, it does nothing to address readability issues due to colors/the remaining added static elements, there's enough visual diarrhea in Discord.
Ridik_Ulass
nothing to add, agree. backwards step in functionality.
WubTheCaptain
JanNyaa~
The same goes for animated/overlay effects. As we've all probably already seen with Discord, they obscure entire profiles for several seconds and looping. The current beta effects already bleed into the content area slightly, which is deeply concerning...
AtTheCafe
JanNyaa~I wanna tag onto this saying that I absolutely hate discord's profile customization/decorations and regularly don't read peoples bio because I actually have to sit and wait to even get a glimpse of it as it's always behind some sort of annoying animated content. Of all the things they're adding to VRC that they want us to spend money on, profile decorations are the worst. Everything else they've added at least adds to the fun of the social game in some way like items and accessories. Profile decorations aren't likely to be cheap and it's hard to see it as anything than consumerism slop that every app and their grandma adds as an attempt to make more money. I hate seeing it and it's usually never entirely free. (If they're adamant, it better be always free or a VRC+ feature that is also then free options. No FOMO. Stop with the FOMO.) With that being said, the existing 2 freebies are already distracting and especially for the nameplates, makes it hard to read. I actually hate this update so much and I wish this was a survey rather than something they developed and released. I feel like the VRC team can do much better at finding ways to be profitable and this isn't it. The more like discord they become, the more dissatisfied I am with the lack of actual features and functionality they're skipping like they have been for years now since the EAC update.
So to boil this down I really hope they scrap profile decorations. It's a huge pain point for me and discords profile decorations are one of the biggest reasons I hate the platform. I don't want to see VRC start doing the same things. They already surveyed us about group boosting and I remember flaming them for it. It too was a terrible idea that made me start to loose hope. Corporate slop investors nightmare. Tell them to cut their losses already!
Kodfod
Thank you for saying this far better than I did in my post a few moments ago.
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