Hacker News Reader

Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

An interesting question might be, which is the best approach: having designers alter their designs (which means everyone is affected), vs. client side settings that alter the appearance just for those affected?

I just am not so fond of the idea that all designs must be compromised (both aesthetically and functionally) for everyone else, if there are solutions that work as well without affecting everyone.

View on HN

Disclaimer: I'm colorblind.

There are SO MANY designs that use indistinguishable colors for no good reason at all. It's perverse that League of Legends uses blue and purple as its team colors—literally anything else (blue and red is my vote) would be easier for many colorblind users to tell apart. And a lot of heatmaps use gradients that go from blue to purple or from red to green…why‽

I'm willing to admit that the very occasional design might Really Just Work Better with particular colorblind-incompatible colors, but I feel like I'm being affected by it awfully frequently. The primary point of design is to communicate information; why restrict a substantial minority from easy access to that information?

Red and green are particularly easy to distinguish for people with normal vision because the sensitivity spectra overlap so much. So when you don't consider colorblind people it's a very natural choice.

It's also fairly easy to have a colorblind mode that swaps the pallet to something. People generally only have 3 color receptors, but color blind people don't all share the same 2.

League of Legends offers a colorblind mode in game that does exactly that - changes the teams to Blue and Red from Blue and Purple.

IIRC, they even use that mode for their E-sports tournament streams - but I might be wrong on that as I haven't watched any LoL tournaments in quite some time.

E: Just tuned into the EU LCS to take a screenshot - and it has colorblind mode on: https://vgy.me/ijQgrR.png

I'm not colorblind and I use colorblind mode just because I think it looks better!

World of Warcraft got colorblind mode in patch 6.1 (around feb 2015) [1]. Before that, one needed to achieve this via addons (with varying effect).

[1] https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/17964863

Your comment reminded me of the talks on the issue of information display for Matplotlib[0][1]. I think a lot of design is done without awareness of accessibility and this is more broadly a cultural thing than a technical thing. The situation can be improved both by technical means (OS or hardware awareness) as well as by our collective education about what kinds of issues designs should consider. Typically, designs become better when they account for accessibility, but it is oftentimes seen as a hurdle when a designer or developer has not heard about the issues and also is not equipped with tools to handle them. Having good tools is helpful here. The situation seems to be improving, but it will take time.

When I was in elementary school, you had to special order large print text books, audio books were available, but required special tapes & players. A portable CCTV could be used to magnify small print. All of this equipment was specialized, expensive and hard to come by for most people. All of this has been replaced by features built into my phone. Special shoutouts to the "Zoom" app on iOS, that thing has color filters for people with color sensitivity issues and enhanced text rendering for small print (unfortunately, it's buggy and crashes sometimes), but it is much better than littering my camera roll with random pictures of menus or the bottom of routers just so I can zoom in on some numbers.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjHzLUnHeM0

FYI, recent versions of iOS have a zoom / light / color-swap tool built in. You can enable it in Settings => General => Accessibility; it's called "Magnifier".

Ah, had the wrong name, but that's what I was referring to with my discussion of "Zoom". I love the magnifier and use it all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com