Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbail | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering how the red and green indicators look to someone who is color blind. Yes, the page looks nice, but I think Apple's status page is better simply because the indicator icons are (I'm assuming) better for people with color blindness.

Anyone who's color blind want to weigh in?

http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/

View on HN

If you were red/green colorblind, of the most common type (Protanopia), it would look similar to this — http://i.imgur.com/QoGzeBf.png

Photoshop has a proof tool which includes the two most common form of colorblindless. It is incredible how many interfaces become totally useless when you turn it on.

If you don't have Photoshop, there's a free app that let's you simulate your screen with 3 different forms of colorblindness.

http://colororacle.org/

I thought your second link was an example of a broken interface. You might want to change the line a bit.

How common is color blindness? I'm not saying it shouldn't be a consideration, I've just heard it mentioned a lot and I'm curious if it's much more common than I had originally though (low single-digit percentages, higher among males)?

I'm red-green colorblind (deficient would probably be a better term).

What I've heard fairly often is the percentage ranges from 8-12% of males.

Seems like, in many cases, the number of colorblind people is higher than the numer of people using IE6. Would be a better use of resources to accommodate them than it would be to accommodate IE6 customers.

Of course, some colorblind people also use IE6, so there's overlap there, but is still rather code for colorblind people than IE6.

Colorblindness is something that can be designed around, but I'd be happy if I could find a plugin to alter a web page's palette.

EDIT: found this, but haven't tried yet: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-daltonize/e...

It's ~7-10% amongst males depending on where you source your number.

Please forgive my total insensitivity..

3%+ of total population sounds like enough people to pressure at least one video card vendor to offer equivalent remapping. So why is this a web design problem?

That depends. Is your business doing so well you can afford to be too lazy to cater to 3-5% of the population?

(And what part of "design" doesn't include usability, anyway?)

Total color blindness (i.e. no functional cones, inability to distinguish any colors) is pretty rare, but some form of color vision deficiency is pretty common.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Epidemiology

At my last company, the two other guys I worked with were both red/green colourblind. Luckily I'm not, so I could weigh in with opinions..

It seems quite common actually - I've met quite a few people that suffer it (not that this is anything other than anecdotal info, but...)

The mnemonic I use for making color distinctions as clear as possible for as many people as possible is to just remember the orange/blue portal colors from Portal. Those work for most kinds of color-blindness.

It will vary some between colorblind individuals. I can see the difference, both at apple and 37 signals. I do appreciate when people use a texture/hashmarks or shapes to differentiate as well.

I struggle immensely with the bitcoinity charts though. red, green, look nearly indistinguishable on the depth chart to me. And when I can tell a difference, I couldn't tell you if it was red or green. Just that it's a different shade than another bar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com