Be Kind to the Color Blind | Hacker News Reader

Be Kind to the Color Blind

particletree.com

27 pointsbdotdub21 comments

As a red-green color blind person myself I can only cheer on articles like this and wish more people would pay consider color blind in their designs.

Off the top of my head, some UI's that suck due to my color blindness:

- MS Word 97 (haven't used anything beyond that) underlines misspelled words and grammar mistakes with two different colors that look the same to me.

- Civilization 2 has those villages that blend right into the background for me. I quickly gave up on the game after looking forward to it for a very long time.

- My digicam battery charger has an LED that's red when charging and green when the battery is fully charged. Um thanks . . . why not just have two separate (labeled) LEDs or just have one LED that's turned on/off?

- Settlers of Catan's board. Darn lumber and bricks look pretty darn similar to a color blind person which makes it difficult to quickly skim through the board and make analyses for your next moves.

- Traffic Lights - Why not use shapes also? In some areas (Castro Street in Mountain View comes to mind) the green lights are very close in color to the street lights themselves. I have to concentrate really hard when driving on Castro at night. Also I don't know WTH additional reading article "What about Traffic Lights?" is talking about. I rely very heavily on the order of lights which makes driving at night difficult because you can't tell if the light is on the top, middle, or bottom.

- Sushi Restaurants with the conveyer belt where you take dishes off the conveyer belt and you're charged based on the plate color/pattern. I once went to eat at such a Japanese restaurant with three other color blind people and one non-color blind person. We were constantly asking the non-color blind person how much each plate was as it passed by, as a result usually miss it, and have to wait for it to loop back around (assuming it was still there).

Oh and when you find out someone is color blind please don't randomly point to nearby objects and ask "what color is that?" If you want to know what it's like see http://www.vischeck.com/examples/

> why not just have (snip) one LED that's turned on/off?

I used to have a camera with a battery charger that only had one LED that was turned on/off. The problem with that particular solution to the red/green charge indicator is that you don't necessarily know if it's off because it's fully charged, or off because it's not plugged in correctly or there's no power, and I got burned a few times this way. So to have two separate labelled LEDs would be a nicer solution, one for power and one for whether or not it was charging.

My previous camera had the one LED that was on/off and I never had a problem with it. When I first plugged it in I would insure that the light was on and then I'd just leave it alone until the light was off. I tend to charge my batteries though in an area of the room where it won't be disturbed and likely to accidently get unplugged or whatever.

I see your point but I'd still prefer one LED that was on/off than the LED that's red/green which I can't tell the difference between at all. They just had to use the two colors that make up the most common form of color blindness . . .

Ah yeah. If it's worth noting, that charger of mine was in two pieces: the charger, and the power cable. The latter went behind my desk, and once in a while it would get dislodged. The LED would never come on if the battery were charged, but I had two batteries and never kept track of what to charge, and it took effort to seat the battery correctly...it was horrible.

I guess the red/green LEDs is just because those colors are fairly logical, although pretty stupid for colorblind people. My current camera has only one LED going red/green as well, and Apple's laptop chargers have always had some sort of light for that too (although, more than one way to tell if something was charged or not).

The LEDs annoy me, too. But, wow, you are way more colorblind than I am.

"- Traffic Lights - Why not use shapes also?" IMHO, Shapes are hard to recognize from distance or at night (especially if the traffic light is bright)... As far as I understood from the article(s), making the green light a blue one could solve the problem...

Really? Do you have trouble distinguishing the left/right turn signals that are shaped as arrows from a distance? I've never once had problems with that and, as far as I know, none of my friends have either.

No, frankly, I usually see clearly that's it's an arrow only when I come rather close - before that it's just some small, green light left to the main traffic lights.

The thing is, I DO NOT NEED to distinguish that it's a left arrow, because nothing else can light up left to main R-Y-G traffic lights. Now imagine that you have a fourth traffic light below the R-Y-G lights, it may light up as a left arrow, or as a right arrow, in the same place. I would have trouble in that situation, distinguishing between the two arrows.

BTW I live in Russia and weather is poor here most of the year, and most traffic lights are made of arrays of rather big LEDs which are brighter and blurrier than older lamp-based traffic lights but make the shapes harder to distinguish. I guess in the US it's better.

Interesting. I supposed I'm just spoiled by Northern California weather!

In any case I don't mean to suggest that traffic lights should be only different shapes but rather that shapes be used in combination with colors. I feel like it would be an easy transition to make as the shapes would be a supplement to the existing system and thus traffic signals can be changed gradually.

The article's idea of making the green light blue would certainly help me but it does nothing for people who are completely colorblind and present the problem of transitioning a standard.

I used to ignore articles like this... "I'm not color blind so why should I care?" But, I've found that considering color blind users helps me design interfaces that have better contrast and are more quickly scannable, which ends up being better for all my users.

Here's a nifty color blindness simulator for OS X: http://michelf.com/projects/sim-daltonism/

Very cool. I was just about to ask if someone knew of such a tool. Thanks.

It's kind of sad that for me the simulators do not seem to change the pictures at all.

BTW simply converting a design to B&W will expose most of its usability problems related to contrast (just saying it in case it's not evident).

Was recently discussing with a friend who is color blind. He pointed me to this site which gives good examples (normal vs color blind):

http://critiquewall.com/2007/12/10/blindness

How difficult/practical would it be to create a software filter that replaces these colors at the user's screen with other, more easily discernible?

I just ran across an algorithm that does just that: http://www.vischeck.com/daltonize/

Cool find! I wonder how difficult would it be to make this a firefox plugin.

Color blindness is an aberration in God's eyes. It's a sin, and you are not born that way, you choose it. The internet is His punishment for your wicked ways.

Color-blindness is threatening the institution of sight!

I laughed

Glad someone did.

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