How to Solve It

With the advent of HDTV, it seems to be assumed that tiny text is acceptable in console games, because the Visual Display Unit (VDU) will make up for it. This is clearly not the case, and many users with impaired vision are unable to comfortably read text from their screen, irrespective of its size and resolution. PC games suffer less from this problem, having a more standard visual display, but text size is still an issue. Where in-game help functions are incorporated, it is imperative that they are easy to use.

According to some game design professionals, having large readable text is even more important in games than in productivity software because of the lack of a standard visual display and the need to read text quickly in order not to interfere with gameplay [Saunders07]. Magnification options would solve this problem. Note that spoken dialogue does not diminish the requirement for legible text; deaf players cannot hear it, and many players prefer not to listen to the spoken dialogue, since reading is generally much faster.

This may be another area where QA concerns are the substantial barrier. Since getting text to display properly on-screen is a problem for most game titles, having scalable fonts represents an even bigger problem[md]especially when localizing into languages such as German, which often produces incredibly long menu names. This may be another instance where the console manufacturers need to be lobbied to provide supporting tools to developers before any significant progress will be made.