

Be Kind to the Color Blind - bdotdub
http://particletree.com/features/interfaces-and-color-blindness/

======
jadence
As a red-green color blind person myself I can only cheer on articles like
this and wish more people would pay consider color blind in their designs.

Off the top of my head, some UI's that suck due to my color blindness:

\- MS Word 97 (haven't used anything beyond that) underlines misspelled words
and grammar mistakes with two different colors that look the same to me.

\- Civilization 2 has those villages that blend right into the background for
me. I quickly gave up on the game after looking forward to it for a very long
time.

\- My digicam battery charger has an LED that's red when charging and green
when the battery is fully charged. Um thanks . . . why not just have two
separate (labeled) LEDs or just have one LED that's turned on/off?

\- Settlers of Catan's board. Darn lumber and bricks look pretty darn similar
to a color blind person which makes it difficult to quickly skim through the
board and make analyses for your next moves.

\- Traffic Lights - Why not use shapes also? In some areas (Castro Street in
Mountain View comes to mind) the green lights are very close in color to the
street lights themselves. I have to concentrate really hard when driving on
Castro at night. Also I don't know WTH additional reading article "What about
Traffic Lights?" is talking about. I rely very heavily on the order of lights
which makes driving at night difficult because you can't tell if the light is
on the top, middle, or bottom.

\- Sushi Restaurants with the conveyer belt where you take dishes off the
conveyer belt and you're charged based on the plate color/pattern. I once went
to eat at such a Japanese restaurant with three other color blind people and
one non-color blind person. We were constantly asking the non-color blind
person how much each plate was as it passed by, as a result usually miss it,
and have to wait for it to loop back around (assuming it was still there).

Oh and when you find out someone is color blind please don't randomly point to
nearby objects and ask "what color is that?" If you want to know what it's
like see <http://www.vischeck.com/examples/>

~~~
silencio
> why not just have (snip) one LED that's turned on/off?

I used to have a camera with a battery charger that only had one LED that was
turned on/off. The problem with that particular solution to the red/green
charge indicator is that you don't necessarily know if it's off because it's
fully charged, or off because it's not plugged in correctly or there's no
power, and I got burned a few times this way. So to have two separate labelled
LEDs would be a nicer solution, one for power and one for whether or not it
was charging.

~~~
jadence
My previous camera had the one LED that was on/off and I never had a problem
with it. When I first plugged it in I would insure that the light was on and
then I'd just leave it alone until the light was off. I tend to charge my
batteries though in an area of the room where it won't be disturbed and likely
to accidently get unplugged or whatever.

I see your point but I'd still prefer one LED that was on/off than the LED
that's red/green which I can't tell the difference between at all. They just
had to use the two colors that make up the most common form of color blindness
. . .

~~~
silencio
Ah yeah. If it's worth noting, that charger of mine was in two pieces: the
charger, and the power cable. The latter went behind my desk, and once in a
while it would get dislodged. The LED would never come on if the battery were
charged, but I had two batteries and never kept track of what to charge, and
it took effort to seat the battery correctly...it was horrible.

I guess the red/green LEDs is just because those colors are fairly logical,
although pretty stupid for colorblind people. My current camera has only one
LED going red/green as well, and Apple's laptop chargers have always had some
sort of light for that too (although, more than one way to tell if something
was charged or not).

------
wayne
I used to ignore articles like this... "I'm not color blind so why should I
care?" But, I've found that considering color blind users helps me design
interfaces that have better contrast and are more quickly scannable, which
ends up being better for all my users.

------
tlrobinson
Here's a nifty color blindness simulator for OS X:
<http://michelf.com/projects/sim-daltonism/>

~~~
a-priori
Very cool. I was just about to ask if someone knew of such a tool. Thanks.

~~~
eru
It's kind of sad that for me the simulators do not seem to change the pictures
at all.

------
raquo
BTW simply converting a design to B&W will expose most of its usability
problems related to contrast (just saying it in case it's not evident).

------
tortilla
Was recently discussing with a friend who is color blind. He pointed me to
this site which gives good examples (normal vs color blind):

<http://critiquewall.com/2007/12/10/blindness>

------
alexandros
How difficult/practical would it be to create a software filter that replaces
these colors at the user's screen with other, more easily discernible?

~~~
a-priori
I just ran across an algorithm that does just that:
<http://www.vischeck.com/daltonize/>

~~~
alexandros
Cool find! I wonder how difficult would it be to make this a firefox plugin.

------
mattmaroon
Color blindness is an aberration in God's eyes. It's a sin, and you are not
born that way, you choose it. The internet is His punishment for your wicked
ways.

Color-blindness is threatening the institution of sight!

~~~
wumi
I laughed

~~~
mattmaroon
Glad someone did.

