
We are Colorblind - bpierre
http://wearecolorblind.com/
======
atourgates
This is interesting, but let me give you the perspective of someone who is
red-green colorblind (though, I just noticed I can't see anything in this
image that's supposed to test for Deuteranopia
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Colorblind4.png> \- but testing for
colorblindness on a computer monitor is far from accurate).

It's not that big of a deal.

Really. On the list of things to worry about in your web or software
development, I'd place "worrying about how colorblind people see my website"
pretty darn near the bottom.

Here's a comprehensive list of the ways that my disability has caused me to
suffer:

* I'm really awful at picking strawberries and cherries. Dark red fruit against green foliage does not stand out at all to me the way it seems to for other people. Before she knew I was colorblind, my mother just thought I was lazy and/or eating all the fruit I was supposed to be picking.

* Occasionally, I'll buy/wear clothes that don't match. Because I think they're brown, but really they're a subtle shade of green.

* Sometimes, I'll call something brown or grey or blue that's really red or green, and people will find it hilarious.

* When people learn that I'm colorblind, they spend several minutes pointing at things and saying, "Can you see that? What color is it?".

Really, that's about it.

I vary rarely come across things on my computer screen where the functionality
is impeded by my inability to distinguish color. Though, I've got to admit,
the BBC's football table example is a pretty great example:
[http://wearecolorblind.com/example/bbc-online-football-
table...](http://wearecolorblind.com/example/bbc-online-football-tables/)

I suspect that things are different for people with different levels of
colorblindness, but then you're talking about ~1% or less of the population.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
My favourite brown shirt is green. Normally, I don't like brown, but I like
that one. I wore it for years thinking it was brown until I said something to
my wife that made her look at me funny (ier than usual).

My colour confusion is particular: Certain pinks and purples are grey, certain
colours aren't quite right (like my "brown" shirt), and I cannot see red
unless it is "bright enough". I see the red of an apple just fine, but Mars
has always been a faint object of uncertain colour. I always thought people
were waxing poetic until I learned of my colour confusion.

I really do prefer that term, by the way, not for any reasons of political
correctness, but because it is far more accurate, and gets people inquiring as
to just what I mean. If I say "colour blind", they assume red-green - I have
no problems with red or green or Red Green, and see traffic lights the way FSM
made 'em.

The only time my colour perception has caused me problems at a computer is
when someone insists on pink fonts on grey backgrounds. It's not just that
it's hard to read, it hurts. It really, really hurts to look.

For me, there is minimal contrast and no edge definition, so the letters float
and shift on the screen and it is painful to look at. Highlight the text, flip
the contrast, readability restored.

~~~
bierko
Something similar happened to me with a significant other. I thought a bright
green umbrella was yellow, but apparently, that was not the case.

------
Xcelerate
Diclaimer: I have full-color vision, but with color blindness there are
(roughly) two dimensions of color, whereas most people have three (and a black
and white photograph has one). What this means is that with 1D color, you can
sort all of the colors you see into a line -- dark to light. With 2D color,
you can sort all of the colors you see on a flat plane. With 3D color, you
require stacking colors.

Now, there's plenty of animals out there that have _more_ than 3 dimensional
color (they have more than 3 types of cone cells). So two colors that look the
same for a normal person will look completely different for an animal. Some
octopi have eleven dimensions of color! To them almost every human would be
severely colorblind.

For most people, yellow photons striking their retina will produce the same
effect as a combination of red and green ones. If you look at this cone cell
response graph
([http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Cones_SMJ...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Cones_SMJ2_E.svg))
you will see this is because 520 nm + 640 nm light can give the same effect as
580 nm light with the appropriate intensities.

Having 3 cone cells is the reason that most electronic equipment has 3 types
of subpixels (red, green, and blue). If you take the colors of these three
subpixels, locate them on the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram
([http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/CIExy1931...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/CIExy1931.png))
and draw a triangle to connect the points, this triangle is the color gamut of
the monitor. The more types of subpixels you add (or the further apart they
are in color), the more colors your monitor can reproduce. This is why Sharp's
television with that 4th yellow pixel can reproduce more colors that humans
can see.

It's thought that some people might be tetrachromats. They have 4 types of
cone cells because of a genetic mutation. There's still some questions on how
this extra information is processed by the brain, but there's a chance that
for these people almost everyone else seems colorblind. They are able to
distinguish two colors that everyone else cannot. This also means that
television won't reproduce colors correctly for them, and it won't look
natural.

~~~
mrcharles
That's interesting about tetrachromats. I knew a lady when I was a kid who
claimed she couldn't 'see' an image on TV, that it was all just garbage to
her. I'd always just assumed she was either crazy or making some weird kind of
statement. Maybe not!

~~~
Dylan16807
That would have to be something else. The effect of an extra cone on watching
TV should be far less severe than a normal eye's view of black and white.

------
kabdib
I've gotten free games out of complaining to publishers. (Lucas Arts and Cyan
Worlds come to mind).

"I can't finish your game, it's got color based puzzles in it."

"Sorry, sir."

"Do you know that about eight percent of your customers have the same problem
I do?"

"What!? Uh oh..."

~~~
mrgoldenbrown
Heh. You are assuming that all of their customers are male?

~~~
kabdib
Not necessarily a bad assumption, but yes . . .

------
octopine
A JavaScript widget, browser plugin, or Photoshop filter to colorblindify, in
various types, a webpage so that designers can check for usability would be
useful.

EDIT: Actually, what would be more useful are colorblind OS X color profiles
and an easy way to switch between them.

~~~
macrael
Xscope has a colorblind mode: <http://xscopeapp.com/guide#screens>

------
albertoavila
The website just has a couple of articles but looks promising.

I'm color blind and know the frustration to not be able to play some
videogames or read charts which use very similar colors (at least to me).

A lot of people don't even understand what color blind really is, it's a funny
thing to explain what it is and joke about it with new friends / coworkers
when the subject comes along.

At least my coworkers now ask me first when choosing color coded post-it for
the current project ;).

~~~
untog
_A lot of people don't even understand what color blind really is_

Too true. Two otherwise sensible, college-educated friends of mine once
insisted that they'd be able to tell how my eyesight is different if I sat
down and drew what I see out of the window. Using pencil crayons that
presumably pierced through my colourblindness. I literally could not find a
way to explain to them why it made no sense.

"No, but we'll cover up the writing on the pencils so you can't read what
colour they are"

EDIT: I realise I misrepresented the scenario. This wasn't talking about
colour-blindness specifically, but in more of a "maybe the blue you see is my
red" scenario.

~~~
ksmiley
Pardon my ignorance, but why wouldn't this work?

Suppose you were red-green colorblind, and there was an apple tree with green
"Granny Smith" apples outside your window. You can't tell if the leaves on the
tree are red or green, but using common sense, you guess that they are green,
and color them with the green pencil. You can't tell if the apples are red or
green, but using common sense, you guess that they are red, and color them
with the red pencil. "Ah ha", says your friend, "you colored the apples with
red when they are actually green. You must be red-green colorblind"

~~~
vhf
That's how they discovered I was colorblind :

When I was in kindergarten, the teacher gave us the assignment of drawing a
brown bear. Mine was green.

------
mrgoldenbrown
I use Flux right now to automatically dim/brighten my screen based on the time
of day. Wouldn't it be a simple matter to use a similar program to alter the
colors on screen to things that are distinguishable by a particular type of
color blindness? This seems more efficient than every website reducing their
palette to an arbitrarily low common denominator.

------
biot
I remember reading that some people who are color blind have an exceptional
sense of contrast such that camouflage which fools normal sighted people is
immediately obvious to some color blind people:

[http://www.colblindor.com/2012/03/16/camouflage-test-for-
non...](http://www.colblindor.com/2012/03/16/camouflage-test-for-non-
colorblind-people/)

With that in mind, are there any simulations of color blindness that take this
into account, actually capturing the source image differently using a modified
sensor? Most simulations are essentially taking a photoshop filter to an image
that was captured on an RGB sensor.

------
thaumaturgy
Yay for this site! I'm somewhat seriously colorblind, and have a page on my
personal site with a bunch of examples that do a good job of illustrating the
difference between what I see and what other people see:
<http://www.robsheldon.com/colorblind/>

One of the examples is a color-coded map from somewhere which would be nearly
useless to me.

Colorblindness-as-a-usability-problem does happen occasionally for me (e.g.,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3489255>,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2765215>,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1098124>). Fortunately, the current trend
for color in web design seems to be pastels, which I don't have as much
trouble with.

------
benrequena
The colorblind simulator only works if you have normal vision. Is there a
color corrector simulator for certain types of colorblindness? e.g. Show
colorblind people what the colors look like to the normal viewer.

~~~
hnha
Haven't read up on it but maybe <http://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/15/dankam/>
does that.

~~~
corin_
I'm no expert and I've only really glanced at that, but doesn't look like it
shows a colourblind person what colours look like to others, it just changes
the colours of something to different colours that stand out better against
each other.

For that matter, unless someone either goes from normal to colourblind, or
colourblind to not, is it actually possible to ever do this? Assuming the
transformation isn't possible... how do you describe "red" to someone who
can't see "red"? Even if you find the exact colour that, for a colourblind
person looks like "red", how do you know you've found it, how does the
colourblind person know?

------
rubergly
As I was ranting a bit about Fog Creek's choice of label colors in Trello
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4330851>), I started to wonder: do
development shops of 30+ people typically not include anyone who is red-green
colorblind? Typically all that's required is to show someone a screenshot and
say "does this work?". In the case of Trello labels, I have to assume that no
one on the team at Fog Creek was colorblind, and that (i) the palette choice
was done lazily, (ii) there was no one with red-green colorblindness at Fog
Creek to do a quick "do these work?" check, or (iii) there were very strict
design restrictions on what colors could be chosen to fit in with the rest of
the site's aesthetic (personally, I think this is a bit silly, because the
wacky patterns of colorblind-friendly mode clash a lot with the rest of the
site's design, but 92% of users seeing a non-clashing experience may have
taken priority). (ii) seems the most likely option. As a left-handed
colorblind redhead, sometimes I take my 'deficiencies' for granted, but that
just seems odd.

The biggest irony? Assuming statistical independence and that 8% of the
population is colorblind, there's an 8% chance that a group of 30 people would
not include anyone with colorblindness.

------
juddlyon
The worst colorblind experience I've had was playing basketball against a team
with uniforms I couldn't tell a color difference. I had to focus on the style
and typeface difference, as well as if I recognized the person or not.
Extremely frustrating.

Second worst was teachers in elementary asking why the grass was brown and
water was purple in my drawings. Huh?

------
Bill_Dimm
I've found this website to be useful for seeing what an image would look like
to a color blind person: <http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/>

~~~
thinkingisfun
and here is the same thing for websites, and has a client-side application for
download, too:

<http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/>

------
hnha
Sweet, I am currently preparing a topic for my bachelor thesis and it will be
something about cartography and colorblindness. Probably something with
OpenStreetMap.

I was wondering where I could find people to test example maps etc on, guess I
found a good starting point. :)

If someone has major color vision related gripes with any big maps or map
services, I would love to hear about it. Not worth pouring out your heart
though, keep it short so you do not waste your time in case I already noticed
or thought about it.

~~~
tomvb
Google maps used to use green or red lines in custom created maps. In
satellite view that color had a very bad contrast with the surroundings,
especially area's with lots of (green) nature in it. They now use a bright
blue, never had any problems with it.

The new bike navigation feature is a bit more difficult. The legend is hidden
in it's initial state, making it difficult and confusing to determine what
colors are used for the different lines. After checking it appears that they
are using a solid black, solid green/red and a dashed green/red line. Works
pretty well, but in absence of the legend there is no way of knowing of you're
missing something. Minor problem I'd say, but still :)

If you'd run things by me or get in contact with other colorblind people,
shoot me a message via twitter (@wearecolorblind) or via the contact page on
the website!

------
kawaguchi
While it only rarely comes up, my specific form of colorblindness
(protanomaly) results in red highlighted text looking like normal black text.
This has made using some websites exceedingly difficult/impossible for me to
use (www.readthekanji.com comes to mind). According to wikipedia, only about
1% of the male population has this form of colorblindness though, so you
aren't looking at truly significant numbers affected.

------
adelivet
I hope the next step of this site will be a tool so we can all test the
accessibility of our websites.

~~~
vhf
In the mean time, there are Firefox and Chrome plugins available.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/efeladnkafmoofnbag...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/efeladnkafmoofnbagdbfaieabmejfcf)
[https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/colorblind-
simul...](https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/colorblind-simulator/)

------
tubbo
How are you guys reading this if there's no `wp-config.php`? :)

~~~
tomvb
I messed up for a minute there, sorry about that :)

------
dnpfwfyuta
How did they make the colourblindness simulation?

