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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

the color choice is the problem, not the toggle.

If you had red or green, which one is on?

Am I wrong in thinking that checkboxes/tickboxes/whatever-one-calls-them are ubiquitously understandable across cultures from both an interpretation and interaction perspective? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve made this assumption/mistake so I’d be happy to hear about it!

If not (and I am right in thinking these are globally understood), then there’s a clear advantage of the checkbox over the switch in that it doesn’t depend on any color recognition to convey the current state. This is a huge win - I have definitely encountered UI controls where the current state was not at all apparent.

I happen to use an iPhone, and haven’t personally had any issues interpreting the “switch” state nor the checkbox, but what if you’re color blind or from a culture where the color doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does?

Edit: clarify intent

Checkboxes also have a fundamental dependency on the label to assist them with their affordance: a label for a checkbox should almost always be in the form of a yes/no question: “are you hungry? [ ]”

The “checked” box is an affirmative, empty is a negative. A checkbox without a label is useless because it has no context.

But I constantly see checkboxs without the question label. Think back to all those control panels and settings windows youve seen where the label for a checkbox is something like “animations [ ]”. Does that mean they are on by default? Does checking the checkbox switch them on or off?

Now compare with this “animations? [ ]” checking the checkbox has now become an answer to a question

> But I constantly see checkboxs without the question label.

Properly so.

Imagine every real-world appliance power toggle was labelled "Power?".

Real world appliances dont use checkboxes to power toggle

Checkbox is nearest in equivalence.

If you were colorblind that could be harder to answer (plus, it seems like a lot of designs have color "themes"). Checkbox is probably best.

Depends on what it’s controlling. The tune of my car? Red = performance, green = eco-mode.

The valve on a pipe? Red means “stop” (off) and green means “go” (on).

What about a heater? Does red mean hot? Or stopped?

Sibling comments cover colorblind users, but those concerns also apply to most e-ink users as well.

In fact red and green are generally not used for flow in a pipe because they have specific meaning for electrical equipment - green denotes an open circuit and red an energized one. This can be extremely confusing with something like an MOV so convention us to avoid red and green on valve position, pipe fill, etc.

I am profusely colorblind, and it's infuriating when people only use colors to indicate something.

Please for the love of god give me a checkbox over a red/green slider toggle. Shapes, please, shapes.

I'm colorblind too but I don't pretend that it's a big deal, because it's not even a daily occurrence where I'm completely stumped by color and am blocked from doing something. Yeah, charts and graphs can be annoying sometimes, but I don't expect 90% of the world to bend around me because my sight is sub par. I loathe colorblind people who act like it's a disability. It's a slight inconvenience sometimes.

300 million people with some form of color blindness, and for a minority of those it's much worse than others. It's great your vision doesn't affect you most days, I hope you live a happy life.

For me, it's pretty annoying having to screenshot applications every few days, to be able to drag it into a color picker to be able to see what is actually on the screen.

It's pretty annoying being in a Zoom call, in a tense customer call trying to debug something, and then having to screenshot a Grafana dashboard and drag it into a photo editor on the fly to understand what a customer is telling me - or have to divert the already tense conversation to 'sorry can you tell me what I'm looking at, my vision is fucked?'

It's pretty annoying always being that inconvenience-to-others person asking for a link to the google slides, because I can't tell what is being shown on that pie chart.

And I get it, I'm in a minority of minorities here. And it's not like 'wow colorblindness has ruined my life now I can't cook or clean myself!' - so I understand where you are coming from with 'it's not a real disability'

But like, I'm not asking for you to go and construct a concrete pathway up a mountain here.

I'm just asking that maybe when you are quickly adding 'a slider that indicates on/off using nothing other than color' to your shitty web app, that maybe you could just go with a checkbox instead? Or keep the slider and all the colors, but just add `on` and `off` labels to it too? Or add a hover text that says it's 'enabled'? Or at least steal Apple's slider colors instead of coming up with your own low-contrast ones?

And yeah, I get it - we live in a world of 'omg wow I got glasses for christmas and now I can finally see color through my tears again!!!' social media garbage content. I just want to be able to know what a button is going to do when I click it.

Adding extra differentiators also helps people with other kinds of vision problems. The benefits of accessibility often go beyond the initial target audience.

But, making UIs tuned for colorblind people make it easier also for others - colors should be distinguishable easily.

Not color choice, but existence of color. Some people have trouble distinguishing between red and green.

Black and white is easy - checkbox is understandable quicker than a toggle.

lets ask someone who's colorblind

Red green colorblind checking in. In the case of a toggle, left is off, right is on. Up is on, down is off. Red tends to have less chroma, so dark is off, light is on if there aren't any other cues.

While that seems to be more common by a fairly large factor, in a quick search of images of toggle buttons there were at least two examples of left being on already in the top 10 for me.

I also found a few that had both variants in the same image, and a few examples where from the image alone I couldn't tell if my life depended on it whether they are in the left or right position, and what that means because there's no shading or geometrical hint as to which part is meant to be the actual toggle.

I wish you were right and that this was consistent, and when I read it I did that image search because I hoped you were and that I somehow just hadn't realist. But sadly it's not consistent.

That said, the same image search also demonstrated people managing to mess up the equivalent of a checkbox too (by changing the label, so it's not clear if it needs to be "ticked" to disable the state currently indicated by the label) so it's clear the problem isn't just checkbox vs. toggle.

>>Up is on, down is off

That depends on where you are from, in some regions light switches are on when up and in other places they are off when up

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