Comment by lll-o-lll
2 years ago
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.
I don't think it's that no-one cares. We're a large enough segment of the population that they do, kinda, care.
It's that they don't understand. I've had designers ask me if I can tell two colours apart, and then say "ok, cool, so we can use those colours because we tested them on a colourblind person" without getting the point that I still won't notice the difference. They don't understand that colour just isn't a strong signal to me.
For someone with strong colour vision, which designers tend to have, colour is a huge signal. It's immediately obvious and carries meaning to them. In the range of design tools available to them, colour is high on the list. Being told they can't use it because 1/12 of us won't notice is hard for them to understand and feels arbitrary. I get it.
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.
Reminds them that colors and shapes must be different in a UI. They’re supposed to learn that super early in their career.
Interesting, does playing a lot of games with a toddler asking them to distinguish between colors reduces the chance that they have your type of colourblindness? Since you can see the individual colors but need to concentrate on them, I wonder if playing such games make the child learn to notice the colors?
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