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Comment by alex_suzuki | Hacker News Reader

I have red-green color blindness, which makes it hard/impossible for me to distinguish between the <100ms and >200ms lines.

This affects about 8% of male population btw, maybe you can add a color-blind mode, very nice visualization otherwise!

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As a quick workaround, you can set a CSS filter on the whole page: Either use dev tools to put a rule `filter: hue-rotate(60deg);` on the `body` element, or simply run `javascript:void(document.body.style.filter='hue-rotate(60deg)')` from the url bar.

Nice hack, thank you! :-)

Can also use Chrome Extentions like Colorblindly to change all the colors. Tested it on the webpage now (I am not colorblind) and I see that the colors change: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/colorblindly/flonia...

In case you are not aware, you can put this sort of thing in a bookmark on the bookmark bar (both FF and Chrom{e|ium}, I assume other browsers too) for easy access. If you don't have the bookmark bar visible hit [ctrl][shift][B] to flip it on (and the same to flip it back off later if you don't want to keep it).

You can also use ublock origin, it has a section for your own filters:

https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/c39c83f2f97c3c6b1c307c...

benjdd.com##html:style(filter:hue-rotate(45deg))

Tested with uBlock Origin on Firefox Mobile.

let i = 0; setInterval(() => document.body.style.filter=`hue-rotate(${i++}deg)`, 16);

Disco mode!

(better to use requestAnimationFrame but I'm lazy atm)

There you go:

  let i = 0;
  function bump() {
      document.body.style.filter=`hue-rotate(${i+=2}deg)`, 16;
      requestAnimationFrame(bump);
  }
  requestAnimationFrame(bump);

Author here - Thanks for the suggestion Alex. From your perspective, what are some of the best ways you've seen people solve for this in the past? If you have links, please share.

Hi! Thanks for getting back to me, appreciate it. To be honest, I‘m not an expert at all in this topic. I‘d imagine choosing a colorblind-friendly palette (see: https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/ ) would be an easy fix. Alternatively, or in addition, you could use dotted/dashed/straight lines to visualize the latency buckets. Might make for an interesting effect?

Also it‘s common to hide this „colorblind mode“ behind a checkbox somewhere. So you don’t have to uglify your product. :-)

Cool, thank you for the input.

not op but this is one of the classic dataviz color palette pickers https://colorbrewer2.org/#type=sequential&scheme=BuGn&n=3

https://venngage.com/tools/accessible-color-palette-generato... also seems nifty

I don’t see any lines at all. Just blue dots repeating the data centers. Very confusing.

Click dots.

You have to click one of the data centres

Tap a blue dot.

Do you have some kind of an accessibility tool for this? Maybe a whole screen filter that changes colors in a specific way so you can distinguish them?

No I don't. It's actually not a big deal in day-to-day life. People often go "But how the hell can you drive if you can't distinguish red from green at the stoplight?"... in reality it's more nuanced. As another comment already mentioned, perception varies across even among colorblind people. I find it hard to distinguish R/G if the colors are not fully saturated or in low-light situation. Also the brain knows that "red is on top" and "green is at the bottom" at the stoplight and thereby improves the contrast for me. ;-)

My comment was meant to raise awareness of this issue with the author of the tool. Many video games, especially the ones with some kind of HUD, minimap, etc. these days have a color-blind mode.

Yeah I’ve seen colorblind modes in a lot of apps. It is great for those affected. And probably not a huge hassle to implement anyway.

But I was curious if one needs to rely on the application developers to deliver a solution or if there was a generalized filter or whatever that would work always. Maybe like screen readers, those work fine if the app does not do something horrible. But with some help from apps, they perform much better.

Color-blind man here. While I think it’s important to consider color blindness when choosing colors, it’s not actually 8% of men who would have trouble distinguishing the two colors. That number is somewhat lower. Perception of color varies even across colorblind people so just because someone says it works for them doesn’t mean it will work for someone else, and vice versa.

This is such an easy thing to overlook for those of us that don’t. Red/green tends to be a default selection, perhaps because of traffic lights?

I started putting myself in the shoes of a family member who is in the 8% and now i spend more time trying to pick better color schemes

FWIW, anyone reading on a monochrome e-ink device will have similar issues.

Those are becoming somewhat more prevalent these days.

There are some chrome extensions for colorblind. It might be helpful to you. Please check it out.

It's sad that this is the top comment for the post. Many people have stopped posting their crappy work online due to harsh comments like yours. There's no easy reply to your comment.

Maybe we should be less critical specially with "Make it fit for my workflow" type comment, and more so if it is built by some random guy in their free time, and not say a project which is asking money.

The easy reply is "thanks, I learned something today!"

I think this an uncharitable take – the parent comment is just proposing an improvement that would really help them given their colour-blindness (they also say they like the visualisation). Personally I find part of the reason for putting things on the internet is to allow other people to use them and obtain their feedback.

Every product has flaws which are outside of design scope. Pointing that is unnecessary. If I want feedback on my quick and dirty project, I want it on within the scope of design, not the missing features, bad accessibility etc.

Specially HN crowd is very susceptible to feeling for accessibility comment. Return of "think of poor kids in Africa".

> If I want feedback on my quick and dirty project, I want it on within the scope of design, not the missing features, bad accessibility etc.

This wasn't posted with that directive.

And if your "design is great" but your implementation sucks then maybe the design sucks too.

Sorry it came across that way, that was not my intent at all… it was meant as a simple suggestion for a potential low-hanging fruit improvement that would benefit people like me. Clearly you did not perceive it that way.

Maybe we should be building accessible UIs by default rather than treating an actual disability as a 'my workflow' problem.

I totally understand being frustrated about people demanding workflow changes or huge accessibility features, but this is literally just a color swap that can be done with a touch of CSS it's really not a big deal.

This was not a harsh criticism. Accessibility on the web is important, especially if you want people to actually engage with what you have published.

Color blindness is nothing new, there are freely available color blind friendly color plates. Pointing out to the author that they could make a small tweak to make their work more accessible is good feedback and should continue to be given.

Oh, calm down. Some people aren’t aware of this, someone pointed it out.

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