Design Evaluation See what your colors look like to the color-blind.

Apple Aqua
The latest Mac operating system, OS X, sports an all new user interface called Aqua. It relies too heavily on color as a cue. This shot shows the window controls called "Widgets" and their rollover effect. To some, the red and green widgets look just the same. That leaves no visual cue unless such a user rolls over them. This example also give you a good idea what trouble traffic lights are for the color-blind.

(Original full color screenshot)

(After Deuteranopia filtering)

I enjoyed seeing your "Considering the Color-Blind" article at www.webtechniques.com. I'm red/green color blind and it seems like the computer industry actually started to take notice of it. The game "Alpha Centari" came out with a patch that converted the artwork to be friendly for those who are red/green color blind.

Being a web master, I have an interesting question for you...are there any tools that can help someone who is color blind see what a web site looks like to those who aren't? :) I imagine that would be much harder to do.

-Lee

I have had some discussions about the practicality of making such games colorblind friendly. I admit I did agree it seemed difficult. You have demonstrated this is not always the case.

Most of the big sites do have an experienced and knowledgeable art director on staff. I get few complaints about the top sites.

Maybe there is a way for you to see what others see. I can't "really" see what you see. For example, even the most beautiful pictures of faces look an alien green after they're run through the simulator. I'm sure they still look beautiful to you. The goal hear has less to do with color and more to do with contrast, readability and that sort of thing. The goal for you then is to see the contrast others can see. The problem area is along the red/green axis. What if you were to switch the guns around in your monitor. (DANGER DISCLAIMER: Shock hazard! Get a professional to do this.) This may not be practical but it might be interesting. What you see will look screwy even to you. But you should see contrast in a few places you couldn't before.

I just added an experimental filter to my site for you to try. It switches red and blue. Could you try out some colors or page source and tell me what you think? I don't know if this is practical since you don't know what contrast you should see in the first place. But it should be an interesting experiment for you all the same.

http://newmanservices.com/colorblind

I don't think the color switching answer is quite what you were looking for. We can do things with computers that can't be done with hokey colored glasses. Perhaps you would like red and green colors pushed a bit into the blue and yellow areas. That might be interesting to. But it would squish the colors you can see well and reduce contrast all around. I don't think that would help any more than the glasses.

http://www.visibone.com/colorblind

Frank A. Reynolds
Graphics Manager
Hunt Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

Yes. Actually, that's what got me started on the story in the first place. I wrote a site called http://palettepicker.com that got Editor's Pick by Netscape. Mr. Visibone congratulated me by sending me a sample of his work that contains that chart. I make no reference to it because it was created using an incorrect method that he got from BT Labs (http://www.labs.bt.com/people/rigdence/colours). I feel bad but it's my good name on the article. I don't mention several other sites that reference BT either.

It was with a great deal of interest that I read your article on color blindness. There was one aspect that you missed and that is of the environment of the user. The type and spectrum of background illumination has a great deal to do with the perception of color and assimilation of information. These factors of color design are always overlooked in program design for the sake of flashy design with no thought to usability of program. This is not the exclusive domain of web-site design.

One of several specific cases come to mind. A large national trucking company had purchased a software program for laptops with laser scanners for use in tracking shipments and cargo for trucking terminals. The software had been demonstrated to and approved by management. Employees were trained on the software and the reception overall was that it would solve the problems of asset tracking. The first night the program was attempted to be used in a production environment, it was totally unusable. Most trucking and transportation terminals have high pressure sodium lights that shift the spectrum of illumination. The program with its color highlighting was unreadable at night. The screen would wash out and what was high contrast and very readable in normal lighting was not at night.

There is a trade-off between aesthetics and function that is very often lost on most programmers, web designers, and management, with time to completion and time to market deadlines. One company president's words still echo in my mind. "I don't care about that. That is the end user's problem, and if they want it changed they can pay for it up front or shut-up." That is the attitude behind the public relations and advertising.

The point of what I am saying is that anyone can be color blind in a specific environment. What I have suggested to various companies is that they incorporate a capability to change the color palette in various screens. Needless to say this has not been well received. Everyone in some environment and/or time will be color blind. Instead of trying to address plain vanilla and the lowest common denominator why not allow the end-user to configure and customize on demand?

I know from your article that you have an appreciation of usability dynamics. Hopefully they will let you write another more in-depth article.

Sincerely,

Jon Neumann
DINetCo
P.O. Box 72408
Marietta, GA 30007

Good point. I didn't think of this. Giving the user control over the color scheme is the solution to a variety of visual difficulties. This is not hard to program but it can be an annoying consideration while making the graphics. It is important to consider such a feature early in the development of a site.

To my daughter, blue is gray so a gray background with blue links is just a gray background with NO visible text at all. Whenever she finds a site unusable, I encourage her to contact the site and tell them why she can't use their site. Yahoo.com used to use blocks of gray with blue links on the right hand side of their page. Now the background of those blocks are white. I don't know if the change was the result of her contacting them or not but the result is she can use all of the site.

I have done my own research to understand my daughter's problems and read that as people age they lose acuity in the blue/yellow spectrum. So this must be considered if the intended audience for a web site is older. And we know this segment of the population is jumping on the Internet in large numbers.

I am glad you wrote the article to bring the issue before web designers. It is important to understand the audience to succeed in creating a usable and appealing web site.

Regards,
Annette Swafford

Most browsers have settings that can override the colors specified by a site and may improve accessibility for your daughter. They don't work for everything such as images. I have an idea that may or may not be practical. Try to get your local TV repair person to switch some colors on her monitor. Blue and yellow schemes are the most popular so this might help. Of course this will make photos look a bit screwy.

Perhaps I should have mentioned various other visibility problems. You mentioned the elderly. They contain a sizable population with vision problems and an important consideration for many sites. Certainly using a larger font would help for them and others yet many sites use an even smaller size. This population tends to set their screen size to coarser resolutions such as 640x480 yet this is considered less and less in web site design.