Comment by finaard
1 day ago
I'd recommend for every developer to get one or more colourblind friends. I have some, and regularly send them screenshots of what I'm working on to get feedback what they can see and what they can read/can't read.
They've been absolutely invaluable for making sure their kind of people can't use my apps properly.
8% of the male population has some form of colorblindness (for women it’s around 0.5%). I have deuteranomaly colorblindness. If you search for images on the internet related to that type of colorblindness you’ll find representations of how we see color and how we see the world.
It is not a fun condition to have, and leads to lots of problems in my everyday life. This blog post accidentally accentuated that issue, since the colors are (to what I can understand) very similar looking to me as a colorblind person.
1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences, and it’s worth it, if you aren’t color deficient, to try out some of the colorblindness sites and see the world as we do.
https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/colour...
> 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences,
Almost everyone to an extent loses some colour definition in their vision as we age, even those lucky enough to have excellent colour vision to start with, some lose a lot more than others and it is gradual so mostly not noticed at first. The is one of the reasons many grandparents have the saturation oddly high on their TVs (the other main reason, of course, being they've just never changed it from the default that is picked to make the display “pop” under bright show-room lighting conditions).
There is an app for that, too: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/
It has a little window you can move over the screen to simulate a few varieties of color blindness.
Thank you both for sharing your lived experience as well as concrete examples for understanding. I, like I am sure many others, live a richer life knowing what others are going through and how I can make tiny adjustments, even if it's just awareness, to account for how others different from in one way or another go through life.
Does anyone know of a study done on depression/color blindness.
Most color blind men are mildly color blind, plenty even go through their lives without noticing.
Yours is on the much stronger side of the things.
A cousin of mine found out in his late 20's that he is red-green color blind.
1 reply →
>1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences, and it’s worth it, if you aren’t color
Not the same, it's a gradient.
Some people lack in vision, some lack in reading and some lack in stopping themselves to reply to comments misunderstanding others.
3 replies →
Ubisoft release some tools to simulate colorblindness. It's easy to extract de color transformation from their shader directly. I'm not colorblind but I use that quite often to check roughly if the color palette I choose is fine https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma
> I'd recommend for every developer to get one or more colourblind friends.
In the absence of any naturally occuring colour-blind friends, do you have any tips about surrptitious damaging someone's eyes to create one? :-)
Though there are simulation tools avaliable which do a reasonable job, I'll probably stick to those where I have a concern. That feels less drastic.
There's apps that can simulate color blindness, which can be used for testing purposes.
This is such an app for iOS / macOS: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/
> They've been absolutely invaluable for making sure their kind of people can't use my apps properly.
Why would you do that?
It's obviously a typo (or an excellently delivered joke) but I did get a chuckle out of the idea of someone going out of their way to ask color blind friends for feedback just to do the opposite out of spite for some reason.
I thought it was intended and excellent!
Pro-tip: there are browser extensions able to simulate various kinds of color blindness.
That is better then a random friend, because a.) there are various kinds of colorblindness b.) you wont ask the random friend to work for your company for free.
On the other hand, the random friend generally has a great deal of experience with what interventions help and don't help.
A filter shader generally won't tell you that substituting white for green in a red/green indicator is a great option, or that a colour that they can “see” is still ambiguous when you have to describe it: “I'm clicking the purple button, but it's not doing anything” “Purple? There's no purple in the app!”
Get more than one, someone with red-green and blue-yellow color blindness are going to have completely different experiences
For sure, but if you don't have any friends, don't discount the value of using tools such as CoBlis:
https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simul...
.. to get an idea of the impact of your UI design on color-limited folks out there ..
I used this a few times to great effect, it was very revealing to see that my carefully selected teals and ambers were incomprehensible to some folks I really wanted to use my apps .. didn't take much iteration to come to a happy palette though, just needed a bit of care.