Hacker News Reader

Comment by shrimp_emoji | Hacker News Reader

The pettiest example of this is red-green colorblindness (the overwhelmingly most common kind of colorblindness).

Many interfaces, such as git's, use red and green despite the common (?) knowledge that red and blue are the preferred combination for accessibility.

I think most people prefer red and green, though.

So there's incompatible concerns to cater to: do you demoralize most people by switching to blue or do you demoralize the colorblind minority by keeping green? :D

(In the limit, you're going to inevitably hit some bedrock of elitism beyond which it's irrational to dig. Your interface will probably not be usable by dogs, for example.)

View on HN

Coming at this from a gamedev perspective - imo, if you can, the best solution is to never use colour alone to convey information. For example, you can have a blue and a red thing, but the blue one also has spots. Or it's a dark blue, and the red is light. Or the blue thing is a diamond and red thing is a circle, etc etc. This has the added benefit that it helps everyone, not just the colourblind.

>So there's incompatible concerns to cater to: do you demoralize most people by switching to blue or do you demoralize the colorblind minority by keeping green? :D

I'm not sure what to say here to be honest because you're comparing these two things as equal with "demoralized" being the only downside somehow so lets see what the implications to the people are of such a system, using your own example:

- A disabled person not being able to functionally use a system that is often required for their work

- A non-disabled person being able to functionally use a system that is often required for their work, but the text is a less preferable color

In the first case it will take someone with an involuntary disability longer, with more difficulty, to perform the same task (comprehension) as someone without the involuntary disability

I'm not sure how you could possibly equivocate these - and then further double down on lack of empathy by suggesting that making a website easier to use for risks a slippery slope of irrational accessibility requirements

Unreal that this has to be spelled out

I assume you mean github, rather than git? It's not reliant on the colors. The "Code" and "New Pull Request" buttons are green, but they also have text on them. Various icons also have assistive text.

There are quite a few variations of color blindness, so ultimately you want color to just be a hint. Handling the most common case is a partial fix.

I think they’re talking about the coloring in `git diff`, `git log --patch`, etc, which defaults to red/green for removed/added lines, respectively. (This can be changed with the `color.diff.*` config options, as seen in git-config(1).) This UI also provides an alternative indication, in the form of -/+ indicators in the left column, but the coloring does help a lot—presuming that you can see it.

Ahh, I guess I've run without color in the terminal so long that I didn't realize it had color.

Just add a toggle for a colorblind mode

Reply on news.ycombinator.com