Comment by marcus_holmes
2 years ago
I'm red/green colourblind, so this was interesting to compare my green against my blue.
The thing I find being colourblind is that I value colour less than shade. Colour signals, even when I can tell them apart, are just less important to me than to non-colourblind people.
I most recently noticed this playing Valheim with my wife. There are red mushrooms in the game, surrounded by green foliage. I noticed that I have trouble spotting them, even though I have no problem seeing that they are red and the foliage is green. To her, the mushrooms stand out as being very visually different from the background and immediately noticeable. To me, they just aren't that distinct and get quite hard to spot.
So while I got the green/blue distinction to within 80% of the population, despite my shitty colour perception, it just didn't matter. At some point in the process I got to "I really don't care. I would ignore the signal that any further difference in colour is sending".
As you can guess, I have fascinating talks with designers and artists, to whom the differences really matter. I understand that colour is really important to them. I just don't see it.
I am also red/green colorblind and so I cannot tell if graphs using colours in many articles (more than not) is so shitty for everyone else or not, but choosing no distinct colours (that I have no trouble differentiating) on thin lines is defying the purpose (understanding) I believe. Even if I had no trouble with colours (being close to darker shades of brown) I would perhaps use thicker lines and variate the style of the lines. So the information screams out. Putting similar shade colours on graph with colour legend in the corner telling which thin line means what is just something I throw away mentally being so difficult to navigate.
I've got normal color vision, and it's bad for me too. If there's more than about a half dozen lines on a graph, chances are two of them are going to be so close together that it's a pain to figure out which is which. Visually distinguishing information in graphs can be a very tricky problem, but at the same time, people could easily do a much better job at it if they tried.
Interesting. Red next to green creates a different kind of contrast. It looks like its glowing (vibrant border), the same way our eyes perceive something very close compared to something far away. That is just my observation, I'm not sure If there is some scientific evidence for that.
I have normal color vision, and color just doesn’t matter to me (I can never remember the colors of things, and distinction by color doesn’t help me much). I’m not discounting your theory, but I think there must be a little more to it.
Not the person you're responding to, but also colorblind and I strongly relate to what they're expressing. It's different than not being able to remember colors. I can see (most) differences, but I need to actively focus on seeing to do it. For example, one CI system uses red/green stoplight emojis for test status. A given run might have 50-100 of them. Trying to see which ones are red means actively looking at each individual status and thinking "what color is that?" because my brain simply doesn't register reds as "jumping out" in the sea of green.
>For example, one CI system uses red/green stoplight emojis for test status. A given run might have 50-100 of them. Trying to see which ones are red means actively looking at each individual status and thinking "what color is that?" because my brain simply doesn't register reds as "jumping out" in the sea of green.
Fellow CVD person here, I have that same problem at work. That and when there are up/down arrows and whether up or down is good changes based on the metric and they use color to let you know. They all look samey unless I actually stare at them for a while and the color difference sorta bubbles up.
It's so annoying too because it'd be trivial to use different signals instead of color, but no one cares about the 1/12 of us that are colorblind. It's crazy that the ADA doesn't recognize CVD as needing accommodation when it's far more common than most other disabilities.
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Yes! I've had some lengthy discussions with UI designers trying to get them to understand this exact point. I can see that they're red and green, I just don't notice that they're red and green.
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I got 174 ('true neutral') by choosing 'blue' or 'not blue'. The 'green' here looks to me like a light yellowy-orange. The color that I have learned to associate with unripe bananas.