Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

Are there any color palettes like this or solarized specifically aiming at various types of color blindness? I think the Emacs "modus" themes allow for this[1], but I've rarely seen something that's "optimized" for some type of color blindness instead of not just being completely unreadable.

[1]: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2021-02-25-modus-themes-diff...

View on HN

Solarized is fine, so is any theme that emphasizes the red-blue or blue-yellow axis instead of the red-green one. Deuteranomaly is often misunderstood to mean that red and green are close to identical (which they are not necessarily), and everything else remains unaffected. It's much more complicated than that and e.g. different shades of red / green / orange can be hard to differentiate as as well.

What's a little frustrating sometimes is that deuteranomaly affects around 8% of men, but is quite often ignored simply ignored. Using red-blue instead of red-green by default would make a lot of problems disappear.

I think colour blindness varies too much - I am too but I think solarized is great, and this looks (at first glance, afk to compare) very similar.

Just have to find something that looks good, or that almost does and tweak it slightly.

But red/green in slide decks to draw distinctions/emphasise things should be banned. Except perhaps absolute #f00/#0f0, which nobody uses because they're not pastelly and subtle (and identical-looking to a chunk of the room) enough.

See https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... and the "cividis" colour palette for one approach to colour blindness friendly colour scheme.

There are a couple of hand picked categorical palettes for visualisations and at least for VSCode (see the issues on the main repo), there are also some themes. None of them are truly optimized as far as I’m aware, just chosen to be good enough, and this is also something I’m working on (in the visualisation context).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com