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there is always a free way to do things, ask me first. http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php @answerbird

Umm well that wont work too well with most people with Vision issues.. most color blind deficits are a form of red/green "Deuteranope", or another type of red/green "Protanope". the other kind found is a form of blue/yellow deficit "Tritanope" Here is a site you can test other web pages with to see how people with color bindness would see that site. http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php The real best way was like back in the old days with a BLACK background with White or Green monochrom colors. ever check out M.S. high contrast mode ;) lol

I stumbled upon a cool web page that will Daltonize images. Apparently, this is a way to run images through a filter, changing colours around to make them easier to distinguish for colour blind people.

I'm not colour blind myself, so I don't know how well it'd work on that particular image, but I hope it helps.

More interesting examples of color deficiency.

Wikipedia links to this page of Ishihara plates, which is pretty thorough. There's also sites like VisCheck, which can take an existing image or webpage and simulate viewing it with color blindness.

try http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/

http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/

This makes it past most filters becuase it is needed for web developers. It renders a page as if you had one of the three forms of color blindness.

Let's see,
- the colors do not contrast
- the colors aren't strong colors, like primary or tertiary colors, not do they evoke warmth (purples, reds) or a feeling of modernity (greys, blues, metal), rather they remind us of biological substances we'd rather avoid (urine, vomit)
- colors that don't translate well to black/white, spot color or halftone
- busy background
- illegible font (also, not hinted, the letters aren't just anti-aliassed, it's as if they've been painted with water based paint on blotter paper. smudgy.)
- unnecessary change of color for the lines
- the lines themselves add nothing to the logo (especially with the busy background)
- as an aside; the logo is actually more legible if you run it through a color-blindness simulator, which suggests the designer might be colorblind
- tiny
- not a scalable vector (it's a logo for a flash clone!!! well, like, duh!)
- the name gplflash itself isn't ideal; only geeks have any notion of what the GPL is, other people won't remember the name. FreeFlash would be better, though a tonguetwister (say it out loud 10 times).
- no personality. It's just a wacky font, 2 lines and a busy background. I bet the font wasn't designed by the logo 'designer' either.

Take a look at some BigAssCompany's websites.. IBM, Microsoft, BMW, McDonalds, Motorola, Exxon, etc. etc. Notice how their logos are legible? Don't have icky colors? Don't have busy backgrounds? Are vector-scaleable? Also work in monochrome?

Ok, Oracle uses a wacky font, I'll give you that. But at least they use a primary color. It burns away your eyes, but at least it stands out.

Now, there might be worse logos. I can think of one just like that.. "Goatse Retirement Homes".

But it's still a pretty darn bad logo. If you'd
hand it in a class, you should get 0%.

"Here are some color-blindness sensitivity curves. There, the mapping is different."

That site doesn't seem to do a very good job showing what the world looks like to colorblind people. I am red-green color-blind, and I could clearly see the differences between all their examples.

If you are curious, this page and this page do a very good job of simulating what the world looks like from a red-green colorblind perspective. At least to my eyes.

"Here are some color-blindness sensitivity curves. There, the mapping is different."

That site doesn't seem to do a very good job showing what the world looks like to colorblind people. I am red-green color-blind, and I could clearly see the differences between all their examples.

If you are curious, this page and this page do a very good job of simulating what the world looks like from a red-green colorblind perspective. At least to my eyes.

Ask them why they want features that you think are aesthetically unpleasing - they're artists, right? Shouldn't that mean they have some aesthetic sense and might be worth listening to?

As far as high-contrast colors that have been recommended - one problem that increases in frequency with age is colorblindness. Not the red/green type deficiencies, but there's a diabetes-related condition that causes a blue deficiency (tritanopia).

For some examples, check out VisCheck. You might also be interested in an experimental proggie I wrote to simulate various color deficiencies and remap the colors - CodeBlind.

I threw together some sites I use at work when developing websites for clients.

Visibone has some extremely useful color palettes and educational links.

Vischeck can convert individual images or entire websites to simulate one of three forms of color blindness.

I was going to throw in some more educational sites about color blindness, but I think you all can search Google yourselves.

Run 'em through Vischeck, a colorblindness simulator. It shows you a simulation of what a colorblind individual sees for three different types of colorblindness. Vischeck also works on webpages.

vischeck.com has a tool to change the colors of websites to show what they might look like to someone who suffers from colorblindness. Here's slashdot through a colorblind eye.

First, thank you for taking the time to make your program more accessible. Color-blindness is one of the most common accessibility issues, but it's very easy to overlook. Here's some suggestions:

* Don't rely on color alone. If you can provide indications other than color, and use color only as a supplement, it will make your program more accessible not only to color-blind people, but also to people with other visual impairments as well.

* Don't hard-code your colors. It requires very little programmer effort to store color values in a config file somewhere. This way, even if you screw up, users can still make the software usable for themselves.

* Actually check your colors. I don't know of any software to make your desktop run in a "color-blind mode" (though I'd love to see such software). But there are tools you can use to check screenshots and such. Vischeck is a great site that has software to simulate different types of color-blindness on images and web pages. You don't have to download anything. You can just upload an image to Vischeck, and it will transform it and give it back to you.

I highly reccomend VisCheck for anyone who designs things to be used. It's a free service that simulares various forms of colorblindness. I've found it very helpful over the years.

Dive In To Accessibility

WAI

Colour blind checker

ISU

Another excellent color blindness resource: http://www.vischeck.com/.

Gotta watch that "fair-use" stuff... it's extremely limited and does not refer to modification at all. You have the right to quote small snippets in a academic context, parody, and a couple of other small things, but it does not extend to arbitrary modification.

Both systems would be an end-user activity that adds value, in the user's mind, to the information already present in the website.

First, there is no "right" to add value to somebody else's copyrighted work. If your use isn't covered under the extremely limited fair-use clauses and you don't have permission, you are legally out of luck.

The changes are not made on the server, they're made in the browser. Just because Opera allows you to zoom a page, is it violating fair use? No. A website delivers you some information, either free, or in exchnage for something (money, advertising data, etc.). At that point, as long as you're not duplicating it for others, it's yours. You can feed it through a program to do word-count analysis, you can feed it to a translation program, you can feed it to a program which shows you how it looks to people with color-blindness or other vision impairments, you can insert your own commentary on the page, you can rot13 it, encrypt it, delete it, etc. Copyright is about copying. If the information is delivered to you in a physical form (like a newspaper), you can destroy it, give it to someone else, etc., as long as you're not copying it.

In fact, the web gives you even more options: if the server permits, you can fetch the page through another server which translates for you, or processes the page to show you how it looks to a color-blind person. You used to be able to have whole collections of commentary on web pages, but the commentary was so useless that there's no money in it...

What Microsoft is doing is creating a filter in the users' browsers which adds complementary information. In theory (in other words, ignoring monopoly practices and considerations), users have every right to use that browser to perform that task, or to choose a different browser, to perform other information-processing tasks.

Gotta watch that "fair-use" stuff... it's extremely limited and does not refer to modification at all. You have the right to quote small snippets in a academic context, parody, and a couple of other small things, but it does not extend to arbitrary modification.

Both systems would be an end-user activity that adds value, in the user's mind, to the information already present in the website.

First, there is no "right" to add value to somebody else's copyrighted work. If your use isn't covered under the extremely limited fair-use clauses and you don't have permission, you are legally out of luck.

The changes are not made on the server, they're made in the browser. Just because Opera allows you to zoom a page, is it violating fair use? No. A website delivers you some information, either free, or in exchnage for something (money, advertising data, etc.). At that point, as long as you're not duplicating it for others, it's yours. You can feed it through a program to do word-count analysis, you can feed it to a translation program, you can feed it to a program which shows you how it looks to people with color-blindness or other vision impairments, you can insert your own commentary on the page, you can rot13 it, encrypt it, delete it, etc. Copyright is about copying. If the information is delivered to you in a physical form (like a newspaper), you can destroy it, give it to someone else, etc., as long as you're not copying it.

In fact, the web gives you even more options: if the server permits, you can fetch the page through another server which translates for you, or processes the page to show you how it looks to a color-blind person. You used to be able to have whole collections of commentary on web pages, but the commentary was so useless that there's no money in it...

What Microsoft is doing is creating a filter in the users' browsers which adds complementary information. In theory (in other words, ignoring monopoly practices and considerations), users have every right to use that browser to perform that task, or to choose a different browser, to perform other information-processing tasks.

Have a look at Visicheck and see what your site looks like to those with (among other things) red/green colour deficit.

This sounded like a really neat service, so I went there immediately to check my own website. When the results came back, I saw stark black text on a plain white background.

That's when I remembered that I don't keep any color information in my HTML pages themselves. I keep it locked away nice and tidy in a CSS file on my server. I guess Vischeck doesn't read style sheets.

Oh well. Now I'm going to have to find a colorblind person and pay him to describe my own website to me.

Have a look at Visicheck and see what your site looks like to those with (among other things) red/green colour deficit.