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?"

Comments

Hire a colour blind person

[keesh]

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.

Charge Indicators

[sadida_333]

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.