Get operating system level accessibility preferences?

Unity Engine
1

Web standards use a set of CSS media queries to allow designers to adapt their designs depending on the settings of the operating system and devices: Using media queries - CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN

There are notably a few that are accessibility-oriented (prefers-color-scheme, prefers-reduced-motion, prefers-contrast). This lets a user set preferences in their operating system settings, and have their preferences applied across all programs and websites that implement the standards.

Is there a way to query these preferences from within a Unity app?

2

It would probably be a separate platform-specific native code integration. There might be solutions on the asset store.

3

I haven’t found any, but maybe I’m looking for the wrong keywords

Rolling out own solution would imply separate platform-specific native code integration that we’d need to maintain though OS updates and when we target new platforms, which sort of goes against why we’re using Unity in the first place.

4

Agree. But accessibility is generally OS-specific.

There might be something exposed in a library like Steamworks though.

Since games are all over the place design wise, it probably doesn’t make any sense for Unity to expose such an OS-specific generic design parameter to games, since every game designer I know doesn’t want their game design messed with under any circumstances.

I would recommend just doing your own settings that the user can choose larger fonts, sharper contrast, less reliance on colors, etc.

5

Literally all I want is something that tells me what the preferences are, that totally makes sense for Unity to expose. Just an API that I can query and it tells me what the user’s “prefer-contrast” is.

6

If there was a business case or strong user demand for it, I’m sure they would.

Go nuts. It is totally doable. Help yourself. Native integrations are a thing for sure. In fact, our team integrates and maintains over 100 different OS-level integrations, at a non-trivial engineering cost.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/NativePlugins.html

That’s how OS-level integrations work.