Compositing for Accessibility
on Maddie & Triggs
Maddie + Triggs was built on a simple yet powerful principle:
“If two kids, one sighted and one vision-impaired, sit down side by side to ‘watch’ the show, neither will have a lesser experience.” Every viewer can fully enjoy and engage with the story, no matter their visual ability.
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As the primary Compositor on the series, it was my job to consider what I could do in the Compositing stage to ensure that everything that happened visually in Maddie & Triggs could easily be comprehended.
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Early in Production, we had a studio training day in co-operation with the charity Angel Eyes NI to help us better understand the nature of visual impairments that some of our audience may have. Through the Virtual Reality software 'Empatheyes', I discovered the sort of conditions that we would have to be mindful of.
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Immediately after, when compositing was starting, I created several filters in After Effects using Adjustment Layers and a combination of effects to simulate how some audience members may see our show. Using these filters, we were able to easily check whether each and every shot in our show was accessible for all audiences, through the already established strong character designs and clear shot layouts.
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Simulations of how each shot may appear to those with differing visual impairments, which helped draw attention to oversights in design and helped the studio to do better.
The Simulated Visual Impairment filters could be stacked, so that a combination of impairments could be checked as well. A full list of Visual Impairments and their resulting effect on someone's vision (which these filters mimic) can be found here on the Empatheyes website: https://www.empatheyesvision.com/post/which-impairments-can-be-simulated-in-empatheyes
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All of these filters were created by me and were used across every episode to check every shot. The nature of their being simple adjustment layers in the After Effects timeline allowed them to be turned on and off easily and quickly, so workflow was negligably impacted (other than in the event a potential issue was spotted).
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As you may be able to see, a combination of all filters on at the same time proved that the series' design was very well executed with accessibility in mind.