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Comment by Prcmaker | Hacker News Reader

I learned this lesson in my first ever public lecture. Approximately 10% of my audience had some form of colour blindness, rendering the majority of my figures incapable of communicating their intent.

Since then I have rendered all figures for public consumption in black and white, and lines instead of surfaces where possible.

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Depending on what exactly your figures were/are, you might benefit from the viridis colour map, available in matplotlib and R (and probably in many other places). It's colourful, so those without colour blindness get a richer display than if you used greyscale, and the colours chosen aren't too affected by most common forms of colour blindness. But for those that really can't see the colours, even if you literally just convert to monochrome, it still works. It also looks nice :-)

Here's a talk by the creators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU

Here's a little article about it (with some R specifics): https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/in...

Am I wrong that in that article magma appears to do better? Particularly in the last two (red-blind and grayscale), it seems like viridis looks the same for large parts of the scale, while magma retains its distinction.

I think it just won the poll [1] because it subjectively looks nicer. NJS, in that video, said something like: I don't care which wins, they're all so much better than the current situation. But magma is a good choice too and it's also available in matplotlib.

[1] http://bids.github.io/colormap/

I have the relatively typical male, minor colorblindness. Using color as an signal is fine, but just make sure there's something else that's independently conveying the info.

Also, another way to find out how common colorblindness is among your male friends: go rock climbing in a gym. Color is used on the holds to signify the route, and colorblind people who quickly start asking about color as they're climbing.

Android has a colorblind developer option in the settings you can use to quickly check how it might look for others.

I just turn that on, open the camera and look at my color pallete through the camera.

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