Hi All, Hope everyone is awesome!
For those who may be interested, I wanted to discuss painting your cars, since it is accessible to a large degree in the new Forza Motorsport. I know this won’t be for everyone but I thought there may be some folks here (like myself) who might enjoy doing this so I thought I would detail the process here. Just as a note, this is a pretty long email so if you’re not interested, you may wish to skip this one. :) There are actually two ways of painting a car; when you buy the car and also when / if you would like to re-paint a car you’ve already purchased. First off, when you purchase a car in the game, you will come to a screen which has a few tabs on it. By default, you will be in the Manufacturer Colors tab. There are three other tabs on this page which you can get to, using the left / right shoulder buttons on the controller. These tabs are actually spoken but it was not obvious to me at first that they were there, without first exploring the screen using the shoulder buttons so I thought I would save others the trouble. :) These tabs in order from left to right, are: Normal Colors Manufacturer Colors Special Colors Previous Colors The good news is that all of the options in all of these tabs are spoken or indicated by sound. The better news is that Both the Normal Colors and Special Colors menus allow us to completely and accessibly customize a given selected color. So this is more accessibility than I’ve ever seen for car design in a main-stream game like this. >From what I’ve seen so far, the very first option to the left in each tab, is >what ever the current car color is. This option is not spoken but you will >hear the click when you select it and as I’ve said, it is the option all the >way to the left. So each menu in each of the four tabs above will have this >option. I’ll describe each menu in detail below, eliminating this left-most option. When in the Normal Colors menu, you will have a list of colors from left to right, which are all spoken, along with their saturation values. You can move from color to color using the D-Pad left and right. If you’d like to change the saturation (or intensity) of a color, simply use D-Pad up or down and the saturation level will be spoken. This scale goes from 0 to 9. 0 is basically white and 9 is the most intense version of the selected color possible. to paint your car in the selected color, simply press the A button. It just doesn’t get much easier! lol! :) If you want to choose another color, just select one and adjust it the way you like. Once you’ve pressed the A button to apply the paint to your car, I believe the View button will give you save options or you will also be asked to save your work if you try to leave the menu. I’m going to skip ahead now to the Special Colors menu, and I’ll explain why later. This menu is also laid out from left to right, and shows a list of colors you can move through, using D-Pad left and right. A lot of these colors are obvious from the spoken description and are simple to apply to your car just by selecting a color and pressing the A button as above. However, a few others are not. So I’ll describe these below. The first few options on the left of this menu show paint types such as Mat and Semi-Gloss. You’ll notice though, that no color is described. This is because these are types of paint rather than actual colors. So these can be any color. You choose these colors by changing the hue, saturation and brightness. The X button should get you into this menu. I say should because some of the colors in this Special Colors tab have other options, which I will discuss a little further below. Anyway, for now, pressing the X button will allow you to create a color using your D-Pad. D-Pad up and down will switch between Hue, Saturation and Brightness. D-Pad left and right will change the value for each of these parameters. All of this is spoken and you will see a number for each parameter. So you might hear, Hue, 42., which would be somewhere between green and yellow. I.E. something close to Chartreuse. Essentially, 0 would be red, and 100 would be Violet or purple. I’ll need to look at this again as they might allow us to go all the way up to white or chrome in this parameter but usually this scale goes from red to violet. So you would be moving through the rainbow going from red, to orange, to yellow, to green, through blue and indigo and then finally to violet. the scale may not be even but essentially this is how you would work with hue. The Saturation and Brightness parameters work together. As mentioned before, the saturation is like the intensity of a color, so what ever color you create with the hue, you then set its intensity using saturation. As before, 0 is the least intense color and 100 is the most. The brightness also goes from 0 to 100 and represents essentially how much light the color reflects. So in this case, 0 would essentially be black and 100 would essentially be white. So if you wanted a very bright vibrant blue for example, you could set the hue somewhere around 65 or 70, the saturation in the 80s and brightness in the 70s or 80s. Once you’ve got a color you want, then press the A button to apply it to your car, or you will lose it when you change colors. These settings all depend on the color you choose and are absolutely not an exact science as colors are somewhat subjective, and these scales move smoothly in their range so even though all of these menus are accessible, if you really want a particular color without sighted feedback, it is much easier to just go ahead and find a definite color in this menu or choose the Normal colors tab and get a color from there. Having said all this, there are a lot of colors in this menu that are very cool and are definite such as Chrome, various camouflage, polished copper and steel, and prisma black and white. These last two colors are black or white with a reflective quality to them which makes your car reflect all colors in the spectrum. They are way cool! :) There are a lot of colors in this menu and it’s great that they are all spoken. Just to cover an earlier point, while I haven’t checked out all options for each of these colors, some of the paint types such as metal-flake and two-tone paints allow you to change both colors. So the X button would bring you to the menus we discussed above with Hue, Saturation and brightness for one color of a two-tone paint job and the Y button would bring you to the Hue, Saturation and Brightness for the other color of the two-tone paint job. The same applies to Metal-Flake. The X button allows you to adjust the paint color and the Y button allows you to adjust the metal flake color. Press A to apply each color before you change to the other option. For example, press A when you adjust your color and then press Y to choose your metal flake color and press A again to set the metal flake color. This way if you change your paint color again, you will keep your metal flake color. Hope this makes sense. :) I found this one out the hard way. lol! Anyway, it’s pretty amazing what is possible here. I’m amazed that all of this is spoken! Ok, so now to the tabs I have skipped above. I started with the most accessible menus The menu in the Manufacturer Colors tab is the least accessible. All options are spoken but each option is only distinguished by number, since these options are completely different with each car. So You can choose an option here but you won’t be told the exact color as you are with the other menus. Lastly, the Previous Colors menu is also spoken but will simply describe the name of each previous paint you’ve applied to the current car. So in this case, If you’ve saved a livery, you will see that file name. If you have just been experimenting with different paint options, you will see the name of the paint. This may show a specific color or may only show a paint type. So you may or may not know the specific color from this menu. At least this has been my experience so far with this menu. I’ll detail more on this one as I learn more about the way it behaves. So far, we’ve discussed painting a car when you buy it. What if you want to re-paint a car that you’ve already purchased? At first glance, it looks like this option is not accessible, but it actually is. I’ll discuss this below. When you’re at the Forza Motorsport main menu, you’ll see the Cars menu. Entering this menu will show several options including designs and paint. For now, I’m going to share another way to do this. If you go to your cars and choose one by pressing the A button on it, you should see an option to paint it. Press A on this. This should bring up the Livery Editor which says that it is not narrated. There is simply a menu here which you can move through from left to right with the D-Pad. here are the options from left to right: Apply decals Paint Erase paint/decals My designs Vinyl group editor Vinyl group select Car select Find designs there are a few options here which you might be interested in, such as choosing another car, erasing the paints and / or decals from the current car or looking through your own designs. For now, if we choose the Paint option, we will get another menu which says it is not narrated, but again this is a simple left to right menu. Here are the options from left to right: Paint body Paint hood Paint mirror Paint wing Paint wheels Paint brakes Tint windows If we choose the Paint Body option, this gets us right back to the page we’ve been discussing above where you can paint your entire car body just like you can at purchase. So this would be the option to choose unless you want to paint a specific part of your car. This page has the usual four tabs as we’ve discussed before. Normal Colors, Manufacturer Colors, Special Colors and Previous Colors. >From here you can choose a new color and repaint your car. I know this is a lot to take in but I hope for those who are interested in this, that it’s been helpful. I was pretty shocked to see the accessibility here despite the couple of menus that were skipped. I got back to the paint options by accident at first, just by exploring, and then a friend was kind enough to copy the menu options. Right now I’ve only explored the paint option and finding other folks designs (which is also somewhat accessible, depending on how well they have named their design) but I will eventually look at the other menus such as tinting the windows and painting the brakes and rims. Hope this helps and happy painting! Have a great day! Cheers! Cara -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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