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Developing for Color Blindness?
Satan's Librarian asks: "I develop software in the music industry. Most of the software is very graphical, with lots of knobs, buttons, and various other custom controls. Recently I realized one of my interfaces would be difficult for someone who was colorblind - fortunately before it shipped. How do other developers avoid this? Is there software available on XFree86, Mac OS X, or Windows that can let you run in a modified-color mode to emulate the various kinds of colorblindness? I've found one site with some cool demos of how colors are perceived with the various types of color blindness, and a lot of self-help sites and software to help people who are colorblind, but no software to help developers and graphics artists avoid causing people difficulties in the first place yet - although from the demos and articles, I expect the algorithms would be trivial. Seems to me that if the statistics I keep seeing for colorblindness are correct (~8% of males, ~2% of females), this could be an often ignored problem that excludes a lot of people from some software. If you're colorblind, how do you deal with websites and software that was poorly designed for you? Is it a problem often?"
Or maybe just look for one already working with you. From the statistics, it's fairly likely that even small companies will have at least one colour blind person... Far easier than messing around with wierd software hacks which may or may not actually work.
I never thought I'd see an article about this. This is really cool. I'm colorblind myself and this is a huge problem for me.
I do essential everything using positioning. I have an excellent memory for where I put things and where things are located on the desktop and on menus, etc. etc.. I use OSX as my primary desktop and I can't tell any of the stinkin' buttons apart. I especially have trouble with iTunes when in its shrunken format.
Another problem is my love of web design. Although not as much of a problem anymore, back in the day, people would use colors that were very similar to one another in terms of darkness, this is very difficult for me to see. Especially in the day of patterned backgrounds and such...I never really found a work around, except back when my monitor had a 16 color option, which made things much more distinct (e.g. red was red, no worries of weird halfshades and such). However, now it is much more difficult to find a graphics card that supports 4-bit graphics. (Why have millions when you can just have 16...). So if something is really difficult (like some games... for example) I'll have a friend or my sister help me out. I'd just like to put in a plug for the only game that has a colorblind option (at least that I've seen, please tell me others if you've seen them, thanks), which is Frozen-Bubble. I'd just like to tell those developers how much I appreciate it.
With all of the talk about software, let's not forget one of the worst offenders, battery charge LEDs.
:)
"The indicator will be red while charging and turn green when charged."
Fantastic. That doesn't help me a bit
If you ever work on a charge indicator, please add a blink pattern as well.
Multi-color LEDs are evil to color blind folks.