Tell HN: Color Blind Awareness Day: Set Your Screen to Grayscale

[matusfaro]

Hi HN community,

Today is Color Blind Awareness Day, a day dedicated to raising awareness about color vision deficiency, which affects approximately 350 million people worldwide.

To better understand the challenges faced by those with color blindness, I encourage everyone to set their monitors to grayscale for the day. By doing this, we can gain insight into how color is used in our own products and websites, and identify any potential accessibility issues that might not be apparent to those with normal color vision.

Please share your observations and any issues you encounter. Let's use this opportunity to enhance our understanding and improve accessibility for everyone. For those interested in learning more about color blindness, remember that most people with this condition do not see the world in black and white, but rather have difficulty distinguishing certain colors, particularly reds and greens.

Looking forward to your feedback and insights!

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Windows: "Settings" -> "Color filters" -> "Turn on color filters" -> "Grayscale"

macOS: "System Preferences" -> "Accessibility" -> "Display" -> "Color Filters" -> "Grayscale"

[pseudolus]

More information about color blind awareness day: https://userway.org/blog/color-blindness-awareness-day/

[Suppafly]

>By doing this, we can gain insight into how color is used in our own products and websites, and identify any potential accessibility issues that might not be apparent to those with normal color vision.

While I agree that this is useful for perhaps raising awareness of how much color is used in design, I don't want people thinking that most folks with CVD actually see things in grayscale. The vast majority of us just want you to stop using only red and green to signify good/bad and instead switch to using unique symbols.

[matusfaro → Suppafly]

Agreed, I was only suggesting to use Grayscale to cover all types of color-blindness and to encourage creating UIs that are independent from any color as it's a bad habit in general. It's easier to remember to not rely on any color rather than just red-green.