Health risk?
Viewing post in An Important Update Regarding Early Access comments
In 2019, there was an update to the Steam client, and within days of that update going live, it was confirmed by several users to have caused the app to act as a trigger for migraines and epilepsy in some people with either condition. Since then, at least half a dozen separate triggers have been identified, and several more conditions (less severe ones than the first two) have been found to also be affected by the changes.
Does colourblind mode help? No.
Can I push a button to turn on grayscale? Yes.
Does that help? No, and it wouldn't be a valid solution even if it did.
Is there any workaround which does work? NOT ANY MORE - there had been one I could use previously, but they REMOVED it.
Multiple other workarounds which have been useful to people affected by the problem have been removed. The tools which remain are useful for some people, but not many, and a lot of the tools which DID work for some of us have been getting disabled for various seemingly-unrelated reasons.
Honestly, that's a good question, but I (and a number of other users with issues) don't know. I'm not normally affected by anything on computers in this way, so the usual obvious triggers (of which there are at least half a dozen which have been clearly identified and reported by users for whom they're known to be problematic) probably aren't the ones affecting me, or at least aren't individually causing problems. Even without having seen some of the responses from staff, the best case scenario would be willful ignorance. And there have been direct statements from both support staff (third party) and Valve employees, not just saying that they have no current plans to address the issues, but that they are aware of the problems and are knowingly choosing to do nothing to solve them. They've done plenty worse than this too, but this isn't really the place to go into the scale and severity of abusive conduct I've seen there.
For a bit of context, though, this is a quick mention of the first few issues that come to mind which have been clearly identified as being active triggers for multiple medical conditions:
-excessively high contrast colours in some areas of the UI, exacerbated by changes in how game cover art/thumbnails are displayed.
-glitchy flickering on multiple screens in the app on some devices (not dependent on system specs, sometimes higher end PCs have issues and lower spec systems don't, and vice versa).
-flickering effects caused by multiple instances of loading images on almost every page in the app which has images.
That last one is noteworthy because if the update which caused all these issues hadn't included the removal of several features for modding the app, about 80% of the problem was in areas which mods could have fixed, but because of other parts of the update, the necessary tools no longer exist so the issue is 100% unfixable without excessive use of third-party tools. The colour contrast issues can be worked around fairly safely with graysale mode, but that causes issues of its own (and can be service-breaking in some instances), but most of the other options have unstable or unreliable workarounds at best. And, as mentioned, there are several more clearly identified issues, as well as potentially some problems caused by interactions between the known problems, or by something else going on with the app that's not as easily identified.