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Comment by lukasm | Hacker News Reader

This is for colourblind people.

Still doesn't make it look good. If thats an issue they could always have an optional setting to enable colorblind mode.

I think we should give it a few months to see if the fact that it doesn't look good is inherent to the color or just because we've become accustomed to it looking one way for so long. I can't count the number of interface redesigns I've seen in services I used that I hated at first and now I look back at the old design and can't fathom how I ever thought it was better.

And if colorblind people aren't inconvenienced (and don't have to navigate to a menu to de-inconvenience themself) then that's enough of a reason for me.

Fair enough.

Side note: I'm surprised there isn't a specific header browsers could send for something like colorblindness. That would allow sites to react to that header and serve up a different stylesheet.

Isn't that what the accept header is for? Telling the server what content types you're willing to accept, including relevant parameters. Something like:

    Accept: text/css; color-blind=trichromatic

Of course no server would recognize this today, since afaik the CSS media type doesn't define any parameters other than perhaps `charset`, but the mechanism is there at least. Also any self respecting web server would just ignore the parameter so it shouldn't break anything, just cost a few more bytes of bandwidth I guess. No need to invent a new header I don't think.

Why not have colorblind mode be the default? Much more courteous to make the nitpickers change their mode than casual browsers who just want to be able to use the site.

This is for sure a requirement for us governmental customers as they require certain accessibility requirements from used products.

Serious question: How does making something WAY MORE GREEN make things more visible for people who CAN'T SEE GREEN?

That's not how colorblindness works. Green things aren't invisible to colorblind people. They just can't discriminate some colors from others as well. I would guess that this color is more different from the body text in some color channel that's extra useful for contrast for colorblind people.

In the same way that turning up the volume helps people who are hard of hearing to hear. Colorblindness is a spectrum, not a switch; many people who suffer from it simply have reduced sensitivity to a color. I'm mildly colorblind myself; I can see green, but I can't see it as well as you can.

Upvoted because this is a legitimate question.

I'm slightly grey-green colorblind, and if you make text standard CSS green (#008000) I sometimes have trouble telling that it's actually green and not dark grey. If you make it just a little more green (say #00A000) it's much easier for me to see.

It should be an opt-in thing then. How many of us are not colorblined?

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