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Comment by mlukaszek | Hacker News Reader

Terrible idea for color-blind people. And I don't even mean severely color-blind, like when you can't distiguish red from green at all, but something more common and less severe, like deuteranomaly - where it's shades of these colors that are hard to distinguish.

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Because the rainbow parenthesis alternate in frequency of brightness, its actually really easy to distinguish which is which, unless you're severely colour blind.

I can't tell some apart, but because they've got a different colour in-between, it makes it easier to jump between start and end of expressions. Being able to box blocks in my head faster.

That being said, I always have to tweak accessibility settings anyway. Change of font, change of size. Having to toggle off rainbow as well doesn't seem to really add to the large list of things.

The color blind would still see the parenthesis at least like they see them currently without the color coding though, given they are distinguishable from the background by lightness.

Realistically, you're probably going to want to let the user choose the colors used for their parenthesis, and once you have that set up it's pretty easy to include one or more colorblind-friendly color schemes.

Panic's "Nova" does this. It lets you pick your palette for the parenthesis from about 30 choices. It also adds vertical lines along the left edge to show indentation level and lets you choose from the same palettes. There's three at the bottom of both palette lists designed for protanopia/deuteranopia/tritanopia.

Those people are able to distinguish suggested colors - the example is using primary colors. And at worst, it would be the same as all parenthesis being the same color (black).

no, its not. first of all either I sense brightness differently, or I use it to compensate. so highlighting of any kind make the text a mix of brightnesses from dingy to glaring across the text.

since it take me effort to actually parse the colors, this is a constant distraction.

so I can read monochrome text just fine, but multi-colored text really slows me down.

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