Is your website colorblind friendly? | Hacker News Reader

Is your website colorblind friendly?

helloworlddesignco.com

35 pointshwdesign15 comments

In addition to color, designers should check to see if their sites break when minimum font size is set in browsers. I like to browse at 18 pt min, and many sites are awful. Mostly because they insist on fixed widths for many sub-elements on the screen.

HN is one site that works quite well at 18 pt min. I don't know about color issues, but HN seems simple enough that it's probably not a problem.

HN also works great w/o JavaScript.

Honestly, the only thing that has ever been a problem to me in terms of usability as a person with strong protanopia is sites that mess with link highlight colors.

Just leave it up to the browser defaults what color links show up in(visited or not) and all should be fine, I've never had any usability problems aside from this. Actually, no, that's not entirely true, this chart [1] that I saw today is a really bad culprit. I have to focus a lot to distinguish between the "Novels" color and the "Short Stories that appear in First Meetings in the Enderverse" color and even then I'm not 100% sure I can tell.

Honestly though, what I've found is by far worse than websites in terms of color-blind friendliness is games. Lots of games, especially casual ones, where you match things based on color are really hard and sometimes impossible for me to play. Though in this area FOSS games almost always include a color-blind mode of some sort, for which I'm glad.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game_(series)#Chronol...

Using this bookmarklet, is the graph better or worse?

    javascript:(function()%7B%7Bfunction%20%24(el%2Csel%2Ccb)%7BArray.prototype.forEach.call(el.querySelectorAll(sel)%2Ccb)%3B%7Dfunction%20fix(el%2Cbgcol%2Ctxtcol)%7Bel.style.backgroundColor%3Dbgcol%3Bel.style.color%3Dtxtcol%3B%24(el%2C%22*%22%2Cfunction(el)%7Bel.style.color%3Dtxtcol%3Bif(el.tagName%3D%3D%3D%22A%22)%7Bel.style.textDecoration%3D%22underline%22%3B%7D%7D)%3B%7D%24(document%2C%22.legend-color%2C%20td%22%2Cfunction(el)%7Bswitch(el.style.backgroundColor)%7Bcase%20%22rgb(170%2C%20170%2C%20255)%22%3Afix(el%2C%22black%22%2C%22white%22)%3Bbreak%3Bcase%20%22rgb(255%2C%20204%2C%20187)%22%3Afix(el%2C%22%230055aa%22%2C%22white%22)%3Bbreak%3Bcase%20%22rgb(255%2C%20153%2C%20238)%22%3Afix(el%2C%22%23ff9900%22%2C%22black%22)%3Bbreak%3B%7D%7D)%7D)()

Source:

    javascript:(function(){
    	function $(el,sel,cb) { Array.prototype.forEach.call(el.querySelectorAll(sel),cb); }
    	function fix(el,bgcol,txtcol) {
    		el.style.backgroundColor = bgcol;
    		el.style.color = txtcol;
    		$(el,"*",function (el) {
    			el.style.color = txtcol;
    			if (el.tagName === "A") {
    				el.style.textDecoration = "underline";
    			}
    		});
    	}
    	$(document,".legend-color, td",function (el) {
    		switch(el.style.backgroundColor) {
    		case "rgb(170, 170, 255)":
    			fix(el,"black","white");
    			break;
    
    		case "rgb(255, 204, 187)":
    			fix(el,"#0055aa","white");
    			break;
    
    		case "rgb(255, 153, 238)":
    			fix(el,"#ff9900","black");
    			break;
    		}
    	});
    })();

Significantly better.

Before the change I can see the two colors on "Ender's Game", since that's the only place they are side by side. All of the blocks which only have one of "Novels" or "Short Stories / Enderverse" I struggle to tell which it is. "Short Stories" is quite distinct from the other two colors.

When I first learned about HTML, one of its touted features was the ability for people with different disabilities to use custom browsers that interpret the tags differently. For instance, text to speech.

Today, it's my perception that web design has gone graphical, to the point where it would seem vastly more difficult to make sense of typical web pages using adaptive technologies.

And as I approach old age, I find myself struggling with web pages, for instance having to use the "find" feature to find simple things on pages such as the login button.

I think the "appification of the web", where information is increasingly presented in a custom UI that is supposed to resemble a desktop application, is largely to blame for that, along with the tendency to emphasise form over function (although this is not restricted to the web, it seems to happen whenever people whose only job is to design, and not also create content as well, is present) since there's a general perception that the more "designed" (with graphical elements that are not necessarily useful, distracting animations, multicoloured things whose only purpose is to be attention-getting, etc.) a webpage the better it is. The effect is to emphasise presentation over content, which doesn't please those who are more interested in the latter and certainly isn't any better for accessibility. The overuse of and reliance on Javascript doesn't help matters either. In fact I'd say the web has become less accessible now as compared to e.g. 20 years ago.

In Firefox, when I find a page that is beautifully inaccessible:

View/Page Style/No Style

which gives me beautiful, high contrast black on white, and text that flows fully within the borders of the browser without having to scroll sideways.

It says 'You can test your site with a color-blindness simulator, such as Colbindor'

But there is no such way to test a site persay, only upload individual images.

There are browser plugins such as Spectrum [1] that might be more useful.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spectrum/ofclemegk...

Last year I wrote a small bookmarklet for doing live, on-site color blindness simulation:

https://github.com/jaz303/ColorScope.js

It's by no means foolproof but I've found it useful for testing sites in development.

upload a screenshot of a webpage?

Design without color isn't just useful for the color blind it helps a designer get a better handle over visual noise. For this reason I operate under grey scale by default on my machine, and only have the option to turn it off for 5 minutes at a time (see https://github.com/cyphunk/grey)

We struggled with this and our designer wrote up a bit about how we solved it. One great example:

> In Illustrator, just go to View > Proof Setup > Color Blindness - Deuteranopia-type, and immediately see how your design looks in a limited spectrum.

http://wistia.com/blog/heatmaps-for-colorblindness

You should read this article if you're a (mobile) application developer. It's not just webpages that have colour.

No. On purpose. Screw those freakin weirdos.

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