Has a game of Uno not yet destroyed your family because you were convinced to play something less likely to end in fisticuffs by a color blind relative who couldn’t tell some of the cards apart? Good news! Now your family can know the same discord because Mattel is releasing a color blind accessible deck for the approximately 350 million humans worldwide who have some form of color blindness.
Mattel’s redesigned version of their Uno decks is now available at their website, but most players wouldn’t even notice the change. The redesigned decks include ColorADD icons, which identify every color with a tiny graphic, like so:
Uno has been around 46 years and is the fourth most popular toy (and the world’s most popular non-collectible card game). Part of the reason it’s so popular is that its gameplay relies only on colors and numbers, making it playable in any language. Widening its accessibility to the color blind is a smart move. So far, the deck is only on the website, and the version sold in stores hasn’t changed, but the accessible deck may become the standard depending on how consumers respond. Mattel’s Ray Adler told FastCo Design, “We’ll still have classic Uno. This is a separate version — as we do those many other versions. We’ll see the response, and it could be something we do in our everyday pack.”
Now we wait to see if Milton Bradley alters Monopoly with ColorADD icons so color blind players can more fully enjoy the experience of playing Monopoly with relatives for three frustrating hours until somebody flips the table over and storms out.
(Via FastCo Design and Kotaku)
