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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?"
I'm moderately colorblind (y'all have WAY too many names for 'blue' - "purple", "mauve", "navy blue", etc.) I have even been known to take black and white photographs of fall foliage because I really can't see the subtle colors in the fall (yellow looks like green to me, red looks like brown).
I'm not sure that I have a good answer for the writer, but I have some suggestions:
1) Use icons to convey meaning, not just colors. So put up a triangle with an exclamation point instead of just writing text in red.
2) It really doesn't matter that we can see the colors, just that we can differentiate them! Most of us cheat by seeing contrast rather than hue - that is, if I see a dark purple and a light blue, I can see the difference between them easily. It's just when they have the same intensity that I get stuck.
3) we're pretty good at distinguishing a couple of colors - not so good with lots of them. So pick only a few colors - and change the intensity so they don't overlap.
4) Consider building a "simplified" UI (ie, a graphically minimal UI). In my experience, I can operate fine through a minimal UI - usually because the colors are reduced. And I never mind losing out on the "pretty" interface because I can't see the colors anyway.
5) Sometimes the ZOOM interface works wonders. If I can enlarge a picture 10x, I can usually see the subtle differences in the interface. It's just when they are really small and close together that I can't tell the difference.
I hope this helps.
-Peter Hamlen