
Making the world a better place for the colorblind - bpierre
https://wearecolorblind.com/
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waynecochran
So when are they going to change traffic colors lights? I have missed a few.
Especially troubling in large cities at night since they blend in with all the
other lights.

Funny anecdote. At the DMV years ago to take my colorblindness test. Guy in
front of me looks at test colors and says "red, green, red, blue." I promptly
stepped up when it was my turn and said "red, green, red, blue." I passed.

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enf
Traffic signal green is already optimized for colorblindness: the green looks
white, so it is unambiguously distinguished from red and yellow. What do you
propose as better?

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waynecochran
This is actually more of a problem. The green blends in with the street
lights. Red and yellow look the same, but they do indeed look different than
green. I suggest adding shape -- much like we do with signage.

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nsx147
I am red-green colorblind, and I’ve always just accepted that I’ll have a hard
time with certain UI’s. I’ve never really thought it worth the time to design
for the colorblind. Although recently I noticed Trello has a colorblind mode
where you can use patterns as well as colors to denote labels...that is a
simple yet effective way and has helped me a lot!

Certainly would be nice to see more of this in the design thought process.

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PavlovsCat
> I’ve never really thought it worth the time to design for the colorblind.

I'm not knowledgeable about the subject, but things like these

[https://github.com/MaPePeR/jsColorblindSimulator](https://github.com/MaPePeR/jsColorblindSimulator)

[https://www.toptal.com/designers/colorfilter](https://www.toptal.com/designers/colorfilter)

even if they're probably never exact, maybe could be (made) good enough so
they could be used for some kind of automatic testing..?

By that I mean, measure the contrast of each pixel with neighbouring pixels as
they appear "normally", and then compare that with the neighbour contrast it
would have for a type of color blindness: if there is a lot of contrast
normally, but not with color blindness, add that up for a "problem score"
and/or mark it in the image visually. Optionally, only care about images and
text, but not decorations. And more things like not just taking direct
neighbours into account, etc. I'm a total noob when it comes to all that, but
I've seen enough to think this might be easy in the big scale of things. The
trickiest part is probably good models for how things look to colorblind
people (on a perfectly calibrated monitor..)

Personally, even though I am not colorblind, I would _love_ to at least try
how my own things would come out under the lens of such a tool(suite). Just
like think working with grayscale is interesting in its own right, making
pretty things that discernible for all types of colorblindness, and still look
okay in full color, sounds like what might be a cool challenge, who knows what
could make with that kind restriction (e.g. that colorblind mode for Trello
looks sweet, I would enable that in a heartbeat). And even if I find there's
some compromises I just don't want to make all the time, then at least it
would be an informed and conscious decision.

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frosted-flakes
Windows 10 has global colour filters that make this super easy. Windows key +
Ctrl + C toggles it on and off, and you can change which filter to use in
Settings → Ease of Access → Colour Filters.

In addition to greyscale, there are colourblindness filters for red-green
(green weak), red-green (red weak), and blue-yellow.

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raxxorrax
I would recommend looking into Tol-palettes. Some of these are optimized for
color-blindness. I use them regularly and have small utility functions to
generate some palettes for n-different colors. That way you have a maximized
contrast and I think the palettes look aesthetically pleasing.

Also interesting: If you want to optimize text for readability on colored
background, you should always choose black or white. Not an inverted color or
anything. The threshold for choosing either is actually a bit dependent on the
device the text is displayed on, but there are some rules that work decently
for the general case.

Here are some examples:

[https://www.r-bloggers.com/tol-color-
schemes/](https://www.r-bloggers.com/tol-color-schemes/)

I think the 'sunset'-palette is a good choice for color blindness, but you
should ask someone who is affected if that is a good choice.

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kerkeslager
It's my opinion at this point that CSS is one of the things turning the web
from a user-centric tool to a means for companies to control people's data.

If you just use raw HTML without any CSS, the documents will be pretty easy to
read for anyone. Yes, it's not necessarily pretty, but if the user has some
issue, such as blindness, they can pretty easily configure their browser to
give them the information in a meaningful way. That is to say, the user has
control over how the information is presented.

Enter 2019, and users have ceded all control of the presentation layer of the
web to website owners. Now it's no longer possible to use many sites using a
screen reader. And indeed it's not just the visually impaired who suffer from
this: it's prohibitively difficult to extract meaningful data from websites.
This gives website owners immense power: by coupling their data to its
presentation, they make the data useless when separated from that
presentation, thereby vendor-locking users into that presentation which they
control. As users we don't have the ability to view even our own data
formatted the way we want. Not only can careless CSS make screen readers
useless, but it can make things invisible to the colorblind, mangled for all
but the most popular few browsers, and allow reordering of content that allows
the underlying data to become fragmented and therefore less parsable.

This would arguably be less of a problem if we had ceded that control to
benevolent overlords, but the fact is that the people who control the
presentation of data aren't even malicious, they're just absent on this issue:
most website owners don't have the funding to present data in a way that's
meaningful to any but the lowest common denominator. I've done a good amount
of research into accessibility, but despite requesting it a number of times
over the years, I've never been given budget to implement accessibility. There
are some good tools out there, but only a handful of companies have the budget
to use them, and even fewer actually do.

The answer, I think, is to return more to schemas for different document
formats, and leave presentation to the client software which the user
controls. But there's strong incentives against that, so I don't think it will
happen.

~~~
atoav
As a occasional web desiger I think it is entirely possible to make websites
that work for the visual impaired by using html the way it was meant to be
used and still having a modern design that looks flawless.

I don’t think designers don’t care — most are just not aware. Also: often
designers have to do things they aren’t remotely okay with, so even if they
are aware it might not be their decision to take.

Contact those with inaccessible websites. They might not change it
immidiately, but enough of these contacts and they surely will not forget

~~~
bryanrasmussen
2 anecdotes - one time about 4 years ago I was interviewing at a medium big
publisher site with a bunch of online properties focused on interior design
and so forth and when I brought up accessibility the very young CTO said they
didn't have any users with accessibility problems - I wouldn't say I lost my
temper but my tone did get sort of sharpish because really, the market was
definitely middle aged and up. anyway I didn't get the job.

Second anecdote I was working as a consultant for a media company and our
designer was nearly blind without his glasses and with his glasses had better
than 20/20, I could never get him to take those glasses off and his designs
were not especially suited to anyone with vision problems. I think after 2
years I did start making some inroads though, so it isn't always a lost cause.

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anonytrary
Google phones (maybe all android?) have a colorblind mode, and it's really
bad. I have red-green and I actually find it harder to distinguish colors in
the colorblind mode.

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SaidinWoT
Extremely likely that you already know this and the answer is no, but just in
case - is there any chance you're using the wrong setting?

There are two separate color correction modes, on the most recent version of
Android named "Color correction" (under Accessibility) and "Simulate color
spaces" (under Developer Options). The former would ideally improve things,
while the latter would almost certainly make things worse.

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anonytrary
I'm using "Color Correction" (well, not anymore, obviously), and it made
everything look super weird and made it harder to distinguish reds and greens.

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pimlottc
I'm not sure I'm a fan of their app rating system. The first review on the
page, for the FODMAP Diet app, shows a screenshot that using practically
indistinguishable shades of red and green but shows a rating of "Works for the
Color Blind". Turns out that's only because there is an "Color Blindness
Assistance" buried within the settings.

While it's good that the option exists, adding an optional "color blind mode"
is the wrong way of thinking. Designs that include multiple distinguishing
cues - color, shape, size, symbols - are easier to use for all users.

A site like this should push for a higher standard. I'd rate this app a C -
passable, but not ideal. If they would just set the "color blind" mode on by
default, it would be worthy of the full grade.

[https://wearecolorblind.com/examples/fodmap-
app/](https://wearecolorblind.com/examples/fodmap-app/) sdfasdf

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dbg31415
Spectrum - Chrome Web Store ||
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spectrum/ofclemegk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spectrum/ofclemegkcmilinpcimpjkfhjfgmhieb)

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WalterBright
Just give your UI developers black&white monitors. Or at least the UI testers.

~~~
kaolti
Or hire colorblind UI designers like myself

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WalterBright
Since there are different manifestations of colorblindness, it would seem that
if the UI works with b+w, it will work with all of those variations.

