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I am also red/green colorblind and so I cannot tell if graphs using colours in many articles (more than not) is so shitty for everyone else or not, but choosing no distinct colours (that I have no trouble differentiating) on thin lines is defying the purpose (understanding) I believe. Even if I had no trouble with colours (being close to darker shades of brown) I would perhaps use thicker lines and variate the style of the lines. So the information screams out. Putting similar shade colours on graph with colour legend in the corner telling which thin line means what is just something I throw away mentally being so difficult to navigate.

I've got normal color vision, and it's bad for me too. If there's more than about a half dozen lines on a graph, chances are two of them are going to be so close together that it's a pain to figure out which is which. Visually distinguishing information in graphs can be a very tricky problem, but at the same time, people could easily do a much better job at it if they tried.

Interesting. Red next to green creates a different kind of contrast. It looks like its glowing (vibrant border), the same way our eyes perceive something very close compared to something far away. That is just my observation, I'm not sure If there is some scientific evidence for that.

I have normal color vision, and color just doesn’t matter to me (I can never remember the colors of things, and distinction by color doesn’t help me much). I’m not discounting your theory, but I think there must be a little more to it.

Not the person you're responding to, but also colorblind and I strongly relate to what they're expressing. It's different than not being able to remember colors. I can see (most) differences, but I need to actively focus on seeing to do it. For example, one CI system uses red/green stoplight emojis for test status. A given run might have 50-100 of them. Trying to see which ones are red means actively looking at each individual status and thinking "what color is that?" because my brain simply doesn't register reds as "jumping out" in the sea of green.

>For example, one CI system uses red/green stoplight emojis for test status. A given run might have 50-100 of them. Trying to see which ones are red means actively looking at each individual status and thinking "what color is that?" because my brain simply doesn't register reds as "jumping out" in the sea of green.

Fellow CVD person here, I have that same problem at work. That and when there are up/down arrows and whether up or down is good changes based on the metric and they use color to let you know. They all look samey unless I actually stare at them for a while and the color difference sorta bubbles up.

It's so annoying too because it'd be trivial to use different signals instead of color, but no one cares about the 1/12 of us that are colorblind. It's crazy that the ADA doesn't recognize CVD as needing accommodation when it's far more common than most other disabilities.

I don't think it's that no-one cares. We're a large enough segment of the population that they do, kinda, care.

It's that they don't understand. I've had designers ask me if I can tell two colours apart, and then say "ok, cool, so we can use those colours because we tested them on a colourblind person" without getting the point that I still won't notice the difference. They don't understand that colour just isn't a strong signal to me.

For someone with strong colour vision, which designers tend to have, colour is a huge signal. It's immediately obvious and carries meaning to them. In the range of design tools available to them, colour is high on the list. Being told they can't use it because 1/12 of us won't notice is hard for them to understand and feels arbitrary. I get it.

Yes! I've had some lengthy discussions with UI designers trying to get them to understand this exact point. I can see that they're red and green, I just don't notice that they're red and green.

Reminds them that colors and shapes must be different in a UI. They’re supposed to learn that super early in their career.

Interesting, does playing a lot of games with a toddler asking them to distinguish between colors reduces the chance that they have your type of colourblindness? Since you can see the individual colors but need to concentrate on them, I wonder if playing such games make the child learn to notice the colors?

Like the other person said, most forms of colorblindness is caused by genetics--specifically, recessive traits. So, it's the sort of trait that will run in the family.

To help explain our experience, it's like trying to distinguish between two similar shades of yellow. It'll be clear and obvious that both are the color yellow. When there's only one example of each standing next to each other, it'll be easy to tell which shade is the lighter one, even if it's only slightly different. But if you had a sea of examples and are asked to pick out which yellows are slightly lighter than the other ones, then it might cause you to stop and study them for awhile to figure it out.

It's just like that for the common forms of colorblindness (where the color cones in the eyes are bent, but not missing), but instead of this metaphorical "yellow" it's this special "red-and-green" color that we see that's different from what everyone else sees. It's like trying to distinguish between two different shades of the same color, where it's obvious which is which when there's only two examples to compare to but not so much when your entire field of vision has bits of one hidden amongst a sea of the other. It's like red and green are a spectrum of the same color rather than being two separate ones.

Mine is genetic, inherited from my maternal grandfather.

My mother was an artist, spent ages testing my colour range with a set of Pantone colour swatches, just out of curiosity rather than as an attempt to cure it. That's how I know I see shade better than colour - she would show me two swatches that differed slightly in colour and then two that differed only in shade (or shade/tone/tint to be accurate). I could tell the shade differences apart better than the colour differences.

So I'm not sure that early training would help. But it couldn't hurt

I got 174 ('true neutral') by choosing 'blue' or 'not blue'. The 'green' here looks to me like a light yellowy-orange. The color that I have learned to associate with unripe bananas.