

Color Identifying System For The Color Blind - lt
http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2010/01/18/color-identifying-system-for-the-color-blind

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rabidgnat
I'm red-green colorblind, and the best color-based systems have a few things
in common:

1) High contrast colors

2) Unique icons assigned per color

3) They use traditional color intensity conventions

Usually, I can differentiate red and green by using intensity conventions. Red
should be dark, and green should be bright. Visual cues help too: emergency
colors should be red and white no matter what the object is. Interestingly, I
can't tell blue, purple, and pink apart to save my own life.

To me, the system presented in the article is more-or-less garbage, since it
doesn't provide an orientation and doesn't put any constraints on the contrast
difference between the presented colors. I might get it right, but I'd waste a
lot of time compared to a well-defined contrast system

I would most easily identify a system using black, white, light gray, dark
red, bright green, and blue. Anything past that, and I'd start to have some
problems. Pink might look like blue, yellow might look like bright green,
brown might look like red, etc.

Sometimes I get false positives using my system: 3 years ago I found out that
the Canadian flag is red and white, and not green and white. My friends and I
were celebrating Canada Day as an excuse to have a party (nothing personal,
Canada!), and I was explaining my color differentiation system, and very
strongly asserted that the Canadian flag is green and white because it had a
leaf. They spent a few moments exchanging "Is he serious? Because he looks
serious" glances before spending a good 15 minutes openly mocking me.

~~~
erikwiffin
I'm also red-green colourblind, but it sounds like you've got it much worse
than I do. I've never found that intensity conventions are all that helpful.
When I was younger, I was consistently under the impression that purple was
just "dark blue".

In defense of the Canadian flag, leaves turn red in the fall. Not that that
helps in intuitively knowing what colour it is though.

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erikwiffin
As a colour blind person I appreciate the attempt, but this system does
absolutely nothing to help me. The kind of place where my colour blindness is
an issue, would be a map like this one
[http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/jeoparmap.jpg...](http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/jeoparmap.jpg?w=687&h=551)
where Trebekkies and Casual kibitzers are the exact same colour to me. Go
ahead and label them as `/ and / in the legend, it doesn't help me in the
slightest to determine where I need to go in the US to engage in a lively
conversation about Jeopardy.

To really help people with colour blindness, I recommend that before you
publish anything, do this to it. <http://erik.wiffin.com/stuff/graymap.jpg> If
you can see the difference between all of the categories, then so can I.

~~~
jcl
I'm not color blind, and those two colors on the Jeopardy map are nearly
indistinguishable -- the same hue, differing only slightly in value and
saturation. It is a terrible choice of colors.

~~~
sp332
Wow, on my monitor one is red and the other is clearly brown. They're not
really close.

Edit: After a quick look in an image editor, I can see that only the red
channel is significantly different. This changed the value somewhat, but had
hardly any effect on hue or saturation. I guess my monitor is over-emphasizing
this difference.

------
vii
James Clark Maxwell came up with an ingenious (if perhaps impractical)
workaround to colourblindness. If you cannot distinguish between red and green
(common case), then use glasses with one green tinted lens and one red tinted
lens. By obscuring alternate eyes, you will be able to differentiate the
colours.

edit: note that it is a little impractical to wear silly glasses

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andrewcooke
nice, but orange and green are only distinguishable if you know the
orientation. so the wrist tags used in the example are orange/green ambiguous
(i think there might be some text below that provides a baseline, but it's
very difficult to see in the photos and shouldn't be necessary).

it wouldn't be quite as pretty if it was asymmetric, but it would remove that
problem and so be easier to use.

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mhb
This doesn't look so intuitive. Why not use three circles with an orientation
indicator? Or words?

~~~
nfnaaron
"Why not use three circles with an orientation indicator?"

!

"Or words?"

!!

That last is great. "Now, what sort of well-known symbols can we use to
represent colors? Think. Think."

