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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

I'm r/g colorblind, and suddenly the indistinguishability of small colored objects makes sense now.

Wow. Okay then.

I hate multicolor LEDs with a passion. Those little amber or green dots look identical to me, even when you put them side by side. I use a phone app that uses the camera and shows me RGB values at a reticule. I've gone through rack and racks of equipment with that app, looking for things like dead drives and errored-out ports. Back in the 80s, I borrowed the eyes of cow-orkers (with the cow-orker still attached).

My wife was a PM on a project once, and asked what I thought of a bit of UI. The designers had replaced a set of small status icons with colored dots (green=ok, red=bad, puce=alerting, etc.). I explained that I could not distinguish them. They didn't believe me; it took that team about five months to come up with a UI that made sense (the same icons, but with colored, duh).

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I'm also Red-green colourblind, and also use a mobile app to check RGB values of things! I also use a Windows traybar app that I wrote with Delphi about 15 years ago, which gives me a dropper I can use anywhere in the screen to see RGB values.

I've also noticed that it's much more difficult to differentiate tones and colours of small objects.

Cues were mentioned in the article, and I think I subconsciously rely on these a lot. For example, with traffic lights I know what the colours should be from top to bottom, and so I "see" them as the right colours - yet if you took photos showing only the colours in the abstract, I couldn't tell any difference between red and amber, and indeed I wouldn't be able to accurately tell you what colour any of them was.

Something people find interesting is that I often don't know what colour something is, but I'm often able to narrow it down to 2 or 3 choices - usually based on context and other cues, and also based on how I know I can misperceive colours. For example, I know I often see pink as grey, so if you showed me something pink, I might think it was "pink, or grey or green".

Another random anecdote that demonstrates the use of cues: years ago we had an old CRT TV, and every now and then it would suddenly display only in black and white. It really annoyed my wife, but I never even noticed - I guess in my head I "saw" someone's coat as red, for example. My mind just kind of filled in the blanks, like I suppose it must always do.

You need to pass a color-blindness test to get a driving license in my home country and I can't tell you how much I struggled with it 15 years ago. The reason is exactly this -- I can work out traffic lights very easily although I'm r/g colorblind, however the test was about showing a number of different colors and asking you to name them. I failed, obviously, but the instructor did a favor and marked me as passed.

I still have no idea what practicality that test provides in driving.

Wow, that's seemed unnecessarily discriminatory!

As a kid I always wanted to be a pilot, but to get a license you can't be colour-blind. I guess because light colours on runways and such confer meaning, or something like that.

I had no idea there were countries demanding this for a driving test though - I mean, it's not like they randomise the order of traffic lights!

May I ask what apps are both of you using?

There’s an iOS app called “Color Blind Pal” which does many things, but most usefully tells you the name of the colour under a cross hair overlaid on the camera, which I find helpful as I struggle to name colours e.g. bright green vs yellow, or blue vs purple

I have the same issue, and use "Color Swatch" on iOS for this.

Thank you both!

I use "Color Grab" on Android

-At a former employer, I volunteered - as in, bullied my way into - the test group for our SCADA GUI front-ends.

This resulted in palettes for both deuteranopes and tritanopes; our support staff on occasion had calls from customers who had inadvertently activated one of the color schemes for the chromatographically challenged - they typically went along the lines of 'Did you nincompoops have some colorblind sod do your GUIs?'

-'Matter of fact, we did. Would you like me to put you through to him?'

I was flashing a router which seemed broken. Each flashing was failing.

Then my brother came by and asked me if I was trying to trigger a failed flash?

WTF?

As you now guessed I was seeing these little motherfucker LEDs as red when they were green.

I hate them with passion. And I work in IT, they are everywhere.

I sent a few days ago a picture of my home fibre converter to my wife when she was out with friends so that she tells me what colors are the tiny LEDs when Internet was down. This is a nightmare.

Do you reckon AR glasses fix this issue?

There are normal glasses to fix it. I tried once and it seemed plausible, though I wanted contact lenses, and that wasn't an option back then. So there are 3 different photoreceptor cells in your retina, each responsible for one of RGB. Many "colorblind" people actually have just a lower numbers in one of the receptors and the more present receptors distort colors, like if you try to mix a color from RGB paint but don't have enough from one of the ingredients. These glasses correct the distortion. Though they can not change color perception for people whose deficiency is caused by a complete absence of one of the photoreceptors.

Ideally, colorblind people wouldn't have to deal with solely color LEDs as a signal in the first place.

I'd like to not spend money on assistive devices if I don't have to.

We live in a world where being an exception means a disadvantage. Changing some factors is difficult. For example, green means good and red means bad. That is not going to change.

My partner is left handed and she has to constantly adapt to a right handed world. Sure, you can buy products catered to both. If you buy for left hand then I can't use as right handed person. The sum is left handed people live, on average, shorter and are due to their giftedness better versed in right hand than right handed people are with left hand.

We both have autism, in an ideal world we never have to adapt, but that ideal world is simply unrealistic.

Now, my question is can AR solve this? I didn't include that I believe AR devices, including glasses, can become a norm ie. this would not be the sole reason you would use AR for.

Adaptation is unrealistic in cases where adaptation costs a lot of money or creates other maladaptations. The world's adaptation that needs to be done for colorblindness is simply not making color the only differentiator between states. And if you have to do so, using one of the many free, publicly available sources to choose a palette that is colorblind-friendly.

For example, in a traffic light, both color and position are status differentiators; the top light is stop and the bottom light is go. Many buttons are both colored and have symbols/shapes on them associated with the color. Even using entirely different senses are helpful; crosswalk signals near me use color, position, shape, and audio, the last because blind people can't see color or shape.

Color in general is just not a great sole associator, even for fully sighted people, because perception of color can change depending on environmental conditions, and because meaning of color is not standard across cultures.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted.

This was my first thought. The posts above mention using an app to read RGB. An overlay using AR would bring immediate value, I would think.

My colorblindness is mild. Can tell most colors but fail the petri dish color test around round 3-4, nothing pops out at me.

I think the point is devices should be designed to be usable by colourblind people, without having to buy an additional device.

Can you imagine telling someone a wheelchair, that should just buy a portable crane to get into buildings that uses stairs?

That would be great, but reality is that product development at many places depends on a few people to be aware of accessibility in the design process.

And there are situations outside of product usability it will be helpful to know what is commonly seen. For example, when someone asks you to pick up X item at a store that is a color that you have a hard time identifying.

Really we should just make colorblindness part of the ADA and then companies have to solve that liability appropriately.

It seems to me the simplest thing would be to have an app that renders the camera's reds as blue or something

It would at least suffice for these obvious kinds of things

I'm not colourblind enough to be "legally" colourblind (that is to say I don't have an accurate diagnosis) but I still feel your pain. I particularly hate status indicators that are orange/green, rather than red/green, because I just cannot tell them apart at all, where as at least the red gets a bit darker so that I can tell that "dim is off", for example. Nintendo seem to be pretty bad for this, at least with the Wii, because the LED is forever this weird yellow that looks like what I'd call yellow, but actually isn't, and I had to actually switch to the input on the TV just to check if it was switched off or if I'd managed to catch the button while dusting under the TV.

There are varying types of colour blindness. For example, there are the "opia" and the "omaly" types. For r/g and y/b these seem to have different ramifications.

Mostly the "omaly" types can get by without too much fuss since colour differentiation is more muted and the "opia" types affect more of the spectrum and more difficulty differentiating if they can at all.

It's more nuanced than that, but generally speaking it tends to work out that way.

As a kid, before I even knew I was colorblind, I remember experiencing this with my Nintendo DS’ battery LED indicator. I believe it would show green-yellow-red, but I could never tell the difference just looking at normally. I would instead bring it right up to my eye, thereby filling up my entire field of view and I could suddenly tell what color it was.

This article finally gave me insight as to why.

Are you sure it ever turned yellow? I can’t recall it ever doing so. Then again, maybe I am more colorblind than I thought I was…

To me this is interesting that green and red look the same with RG blindness. I'm YB blind in one eye, but I can easily tell a yellow thing isn't blue, and vice versa. It's the colours around blue and around yellow that I can't differentiate with that eye. (ie: red and orange are just red, green and blue are cyan, and dark blue or purple might as well be black. Royal purple looks like rich chocolate, so that's kinda entertaining.) So the deficient pigments seem to have very different results to colour perception.

Fun fact: I sometimes entertain myself by A/B testing between both eyes with my hand. It's especially interesting at Christmas when bright colours abound. Anyone who's ever seen me doing that probably thinks I'm a bit off, but that's okay. It will probably help with social distancing this year.

That's a big reason for the order of lights in traffic lights.

New lights, around here, are also getting reflective frames, so that people can better understand the position of the active light.

https://pxhere.com/en/photo/265717

R/G colorblind here. I didn't realize how much I relied on traffic light order until I visited Houston, TX where the lights were horizontal. It was a very alarming experience.

In Michigan traffic lights are painted yellow, which works well for me at night. In California traffic lights are painted black, which means at night I cannot distinguish red and yellow lights. Although some traffic lights are now getting a reflective strip around the outside, which is the best.

It's briefly confusing if you have only lived in places with vertical traffic lights, and then move to someplace that has horizontal traffic lights, and vice versa.

> I use a phone app that uses the camera and shows me RGB values at a reticule.

Could you share the app name? It would make my life a bit easier (I hate those red/amber/green leds that look identical) :)

I use Color Blind Pal on Android. Been using it for a few years.

If you get it, I'd recommend going into the settings and increasing the sample size - it defaults to "small", which given the way it flickers I'd guess means "1 pixel" :) I use it on the "large" setting, and it works great.

Oh thank you, thank you.

I just installed that and do not know why I never tried to find something like this.

I am not sure how setting the kind of color blindness helps but having the color names displayed is wonderful.

On Android, there's "Color Blind Pal" that I use, doesn't use RGB values, but gives you names for the colors instead.

I’ve been happy using Cone on iOS after seeing it get brought up on HN previously. It’s paid, but it was worth it to me.

On iOS, it's "Color Blind Pal".

To the opposite, I have a rather good sense of color. It bothers me when designers make every icon the same color, because I distinguish colors much faster than shapes. (Much easier still than using an app that would tell me which shape it is, of course.)

I think the visual design should embrace both shapes and colors, and use color palettes that are discernible for people with different senses of color.

The objection is usually that the design must look "neat". I'd say that a visually neat but unusable design wastes all the effort that went to making it neat anyway. Being bold and even flamboyant in order to be highly visually discernible pays off most of the time; look at flowers.

Just to clarify (for my own edification) If you look at the colors #FF0000 (red) and #00FF00 (green) does one look greyish or do they both look like the same color?

Also, apparently this is news to many r/g color-challenged people: peanut butter doesn't look green to every one else. It looks brown (which I don't know if a separate color to you)

I am red/green colorblind. I actually knew about this because they tested for it the first time I got glasses, and it came up there. But for years afterward I never really thought about it; I’d be able to tell basically every color and only falter on some that seemed ambiguous to me but others had an easier time distinguishing–but I never ascribed this to colorblindness; I just thought it was I who didn’t know the colors well enough. For both of your examples: pure red and pure green are very clearly, obviously distinct colors. I don’t think peanut butter looks green at all, it’s clearly a shade of light brown. Really, the only way I can describe the difference I see is this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Signs_and_symp.... There’s a picture of a landscape with various colorblindness filters applied to it. The first two images look identical to me.

I can tell you that it's not about knowing my colors, the colors of the apples you linked look as different as white vs black to me. And they would look just as distinct even if I didn't know my colors.

Yep, I would never confuse those two. And I can tell that the images on the “bottom” are somewhat different.

Not the OP, but I'm also R/G color blind and I don't believe I'd have any issues with those extreme versions of R and G. My issues happen with lighter shades.

For instance, 00AA00 and 00BB00 are very hard for me. 00CC00 is about when I start feeling confident I could recognize it as green, but it's be harder if the surface area was fairly small (for example text). On the red side, the recognition issues also extend to about CC0000.

It seems that there are many shades (Pardon the pun) of colour blindness.

I'm R/G colour blind, but I can still see red and green. I have issues when red and green are close to one another or blended though.

It becomes impossible for me to distinguish between what is red and what is green, or where the colours start and end.

I read the article and it really hit the nail on the head, speaking as someone that is also r/g colorblind.

I recently bought an Amazon Basics charger for my rechargeable AA and AAA batteries. My old one had a bicolor LED for charging and charged. The new one shows red for charging and turns off for charged. I love not having to ask my wife when the batteries are charged anymore.

Now I just live in fear of colored graphs and charts where the legend has tiny small colored squares so you can distinguish which line is which.

I, too, am r/g colourblind, and don't know anyone else who is. Multicolour LEDs have always been a problem for me, and my gf can't believe that I can't read them... I also have issues with the UI of one of the apps I use regularly (wavelab) as the master section on/off is the wrong shades of red and green, so that's a problem.

Thanks to everyone for posting in here about it - I no longer (at 49!) feel like I'm the only one in the world who has this issue with LEDs in particular.

Wait. Didn't cow-orkers see in black and white?

You wrote co-worker cow-orker TWICE!

http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/C/cow-orker.html

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