Comment by atourgates | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atourgates | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting, but let me give you the perspective of someone who is red-green colorblind (though, I just noticed I can't see anything in this image that's supposed to test for Deuteranopia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Colorblind4.png - but testing for colorblindness on a computer monitor is far from accurate).

It's not that big of a deal.

Really. On the list of things to worry about in your web or software development, I'd place "worrying about how colorblind people see my website" pretty darn near the bottom.

Here's a comprehensive list of the ways that my disability has caused me to suffer:

* I'm really awful at picking strawberries and cherries. Dark red fruit against green foliage does not stand out at all to me the way it seems to for other people. Before she knew I was colorblind, my mother just thought I was lazy and/or eating all the fruit I was supposed to be picking.

* Occasionally, I'll buy/wear clothes that don't match. Because I think they're brown, but really they're a subtle shade of green.

* Sometimes, I'll call something brown or grey or blue that's really red or green, and people will find it hilarious.

* When people learn that I'm colorblind, they spend several minutes pointing at things and saying, "Can you see that? What color is it?".

Really, that's about it.

I vary rarely come across things on my computer screen where the functionality is impeded by my inability to distinguish color. Though, I've got to admit, the BBC's football table example is a pretty great example: http://wearecolorblind.com/example/bbc-online-football-table...

I suspect that things are different for people with different levels of colorblindness, but then you're talking about ~1% or less of the population.

My favourite brown shirt is green. Normally, I don't like brown, but I like that one. I wore it for years thinking it was brown until I said something to my wife that made her look at me funny (ier than usual).

My colour confusion is particular: Certain pinks and purples are grey, certain colours aren't quite right (like my "brown" shirt), and I cannot see red unless it is "bright enough". I see the red of an apple just fine, but Mars has always been a faint object of uncertain colour. I always thought people were waxing poetic until I learned of my colour confusion.

I really do prefer that term, by the way, not for any reasons of political correctness, but because it is far more accurate, and gets people inquiring as to just what I mean. If I say "colour blind", they assume red-green - I have no problems with red or green or Red Green, and see traffic lights the way FSM made 'em.

The only time my colour perception has caused me problems at a computer is when someone insists on pink fonts on grey backgrounds. It's not just that it's hard to read, it hurts. It really, really hurts to look.

For me, there is minimal contrast and no edge definition, so the letters float and shift on the screen and it is painful to look at. Highlight the text, flip the contrast, readability restored.

Something similar happened to me with a significant other. I thought a bright green umbrella was yellow, but apparently, that was not the case.

I've had the exact same experience.

The only situations I've really run across problems with color is with labeling or tagging, if colors play a critical role in distinguishing the tags. This was particularly bad in Trello before they introduced a color-blind mode. I actually dislike the way they handled it. Trello only allows 6 predefined colors for labels, and the colors they picked were particularly bad for those with red-green colorblindness (I could barely distinguish between the blue and purple, and could distinguish the red and orange side-by-side but not identify in isolation); they then introduced a color blind friendly mode that adds unique patterns to the most problematic colors (blue, orange, green). What bothers me about this is that it would have been extremely easy to just pick 6 colors that weren't problematic (red, dark blue, light blue, yellow, black; there, that took me under a minute, and the least you could do is consult a representative of 8% of your users for 30 seconds). Once they realized the colors they'd chosen were a problem for red-green color blind users, I understand why they introduced a new mode instead of changing the colors for everyone, since that would disrupt and confuse many people ("I don't know where I put the card, I just made it purple, and now there's no purple!"), but the problem could have been much more elegantly solved with a bit more forethought.

Summary: color blindness is only a handicap in situations where identifying color is critical. Situations like this aren't that common, but there are cases, and when you're going to put significant thought into picking a color palette it just comes off as lazy and irresponsible (unless there really isn't a good solution—e.g., picking a palette of 50 colors).

Pointing at things asking what colour it is, always happens to me too.

I recently downloaded a handy app, that lets to point your camera at objects and tells you the colour. It's called kleur (iOS), it's pretty cool, has 1500 colours but it's not 100% accurate.

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