Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on the infamous Pokémon episode

But do you honestly expect humanity to only create content for this miniscule populace? That sounds horribly limiting.

There is a place for unbounded creativity, and I think I'd argue in favor of it, but I can't imagine an easier argument against it: We try to only create websites with sufficiently high contrast for interactive elements, only create public buildings with ADA features, etc. -- even if aesthetics suffer as a result. It's just aesthetics.

To be clear, I'm discussing only that which the public is invited to enjoy. No rules when it's just for you and yours.

TFA notes that it's not just a "miniscule populace". Electric Porygon affected 10% of the people who watched it, most of whom were not epileptic.

> According to the World Health Organisation, about 10% of people will have a seizure in their lifetime. And these non-epileptic seizures are exactly what occurred during “Electric Soldier Porygon.” 76% of those who had seizures during the event had never experienced a seizure before, and of those who had, most had never had a seizure provoked by TV before. This event is actually what helped confirm that people without any history of epilepsy can have seizures triggered by flashing lights. It is estimated that of the 7 million viewers, 10% had some sort of physical medical reaction but not all of these needed specific medical attention.

I'd be very interested to see how they came up with that estimation.

I'd like to see a source for that estimate, because "10% had some sort of physical medical reaction" is quite vague and seems improbably high.

Wikipedia states the episode was viewed by 4.6 million households, of whom 685 (0.001%) were taken to hospital. While 12,000 children reported mild symptoms (0.2%), studies suggest many of these were psychosomatic and triggered more by parents freaking out over exposure (this was huge news in Japan) than the exposure itself.

I thought it was accepted that mass hysteria after reports of the first children were sent to the hospital was most likely to blame for the overwhelming majority of reports of negative reactions.

Humanity does.

Isn't art the place for unbounded creativity?

Yes. But when you invite the public to subject themselves to art incompatible with schizophrenia, then is it that much different from inviting the public to a website incompatible with visual impairments or to a brand new store incompatible with wheelchairs? Again I do lean on the side of art in this case, but I also find the argument against it to be pretty solid.

Counterpoint: while high contrast requirements can make the designer rethink the aesthetics approach, it also makes text easier to read for everybody. Of course, website authors can get lazy and just crank up the contrast without considering whether it looks good, but that’s just bad design.

On the other hand, the techniques we see applied to anime releases are just that: quick low effort fixes. Of course, this doesn’t mean the show producers are lazy or incompetent: fixing those issues properly would take extreme effort as at least a lot of re-coloring. Still, the result is that now everybody has subpar experience.

I’d say just release both versions and let people decide.

I could understand if this was something major, but avoiding excessively flashing lights doesn't seem all that limiting to me.