Comment by Suppafly
2 years ago
>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.