Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

I always tell a joke about colorblind design:

> User: My hands don't work very well, I can't drive

> Designer: What if we made the steering wheel larger?

Which is to say that for myself and many like me, 'colorblind modes' frankly suck.

Sure, a bigger steering wheel helps a bit (now you can try to move it with your feet..) but what'd be a hell of a lot nicer is avoiding a hands-only design in the first place.

My brain isn't wired to look at colors and register that as /a unique thing/, I regularly enjoy 'surprises' when I realize _oh my god they meant that color to mean something_. My brain registers /contrasts/ as unique things, not colors.

Strip your design of all color and ask yourself if it is joyful to use. If it's not, it's poor for many colorblind users too. macOS gives me red/yellow/green buttons to interact with windows, wtf are those? But if you give me symbols like `x`, `-` and `[ ]`? Now I know what we're talking about.

Make your design work without color, and then add pleasant colors for those who enjoy it.

---

Opposite to that I'll say I realize I'm in a minority of minorities here; I don't expect anyone to do anything special for me. I just find a lot of humor in the seemingly endless revelations of 'you can see things the way colorblind people do' via image filters. Reminds me of the 'gifting my uncle colorblind glasses' videos that go viral every week.

«Minority of minorities» feels accurate to me and I remember the moment of creative power when I realized that I need to take matters into my own hands. As you wrote, we can't rely on others to do things for us.

So I made a tool that tells me the name of the closest web color to whatever is under the mouse pointer. It's not perfect, but it's certainly easier than trying to discern RGB values.

I'm proud that I've turned my prototype into a polished product, available in 5 languages on the Mac App Store and with a nifty shortcut for copying colors to the clipboard. Check out the link in my bio, if you're interested. I know I'll probably get some downvotes, but I'm excited to share this with others who may find it useful.

I used 3d glasses (the red/green ones) for many years. They were great, one of the two colours turns to black depending which one you used.

Honestly I should just make a browser plugin which universally removes the colours you can't see and switches them with someone we can see.

I think closest color name is great, but re: discerning RBG values, I think folks trying to do so would be in a great position to decide if HSL values really are easier to parse.

https://sujansundareswaran.com/blog/why-hsl-is-better-than-h...

I'm also colorblind, and I think the hardest thing for people to understand is your statement "My brain isn't wired to look at colors and register that as /a unique thing/".

When people find out I'm colorblind they love to ask me the never ending stream of "What color is X?" questions, which are fun but superficial. I think the bigger difference between myself and people with normal color vision is how often I fail use color as a piece of information.

On the other hand visual texture means a ton to me. When it comes to clothes I could care less about the color but can absolutely be swayed by the look of the fabric.

Yeah, I find the same thing. I am "red green colorblind" but my experience is that there is a long tail of effects beyond the simple rules that you read about.

I'm friends with a lot of visual artists and designers and a subset of them clearly have color vision beyond the ordinary. That is something to be aware of as a designer, that even non-colorblind people may not be able to detect some of the subtle differences you can (especially if you have a nicer/better calibrated monitor).

You know, I never really realized it before you put it into words, but you're right. Not seeing some colors as well or at all is something, but the most confusing thing, usually both for me and other people, is how they're able to precisely categorize almost any color into a discrete group, and I have a very hard time doing that.

I'm also in the same boat as to "what should we do about it". At least it's something that's easy to explain to people and well known. I always wonder if there are not lots of people going around that perceive things in very different ways than other people, and have no way of knowing if it's just us. You can test colorblindness with the plates, but what if all food tastes off to you, how do you test that? Or if human voices tend to sound like screenching?

Your point about colors vs shape is also interesting. I wonder if the fact that I'm colorblind plays into my preferences of terminals, text and keyboard shortcut.

> Strip your design of all color

It's harder than it sounds. If you have total color blindness, your mapping between colors and values might be entirely different from most people, or even other people with monochromacy.

Color blindness in general is a pretty wide range of perception abilities. There's a classification but it's fairly rough. It's usually close to impossible to design something that makes sense for all colorblind people at the same time, because the types overlap heavily.

It's funny you mention it. I'm not a designer in any professional sense, but I've found myself thinking about colors purely as a communication channel. Namely I came to the conclusion that you can shove at most 4 bits of information into it, 1 bit of rgb and a birght/dark variant (color blindness notwithstanding). Designs which try to pack more info into this channel then they should are doomed to fail. The real answer after colors are exhausted is to move to shapes as a differentiator. There's a few primary shapes just like primary colors. () [] <> ×. Just like colors, they can be mixed. People will guess that a tear drop shape is in some way a combination of whatever the circle and whatever the trianlge/diamond represent. Eg you're allowed to make [) and <). But once you try to mix too many outlines together it all becomes grey in a sense. Trying to put a square, triangle, and arch each on a quarter of the outline just becomes an amorphous blob rather than an intuitive merger of established symbols. In a very real sense, basic shapes are a form of color from the perspective of design elements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com