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by msbarnett 2543 days ago
In attempting to defend Color blind people, you go too far in painting them as helpless. The use of color to distinguish thing is not in-and-of-itself exclusionary. Color blind people are still perfectly capable of distinguishing shades.

As long as you use fairly different shades of red and green, they can still match the cable to its matching color shaded port. Much UI accessibility is based on this fact.
2 comments
mclehman 2543 days ago
Speaking as an only mildly colorblind person, I still tend not to use color to differentiate things. Even when it's two colors I can easily tell the difference between, I don't reach for color as a disambiguating feature unless I consciously try to.

Having to go even further than that and use shades of the colors I do have trouble with would be far more onerous.

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tomxor 2543 days ago
Had you used a monochrome filter on software while adding accessibility you probably wouldn't suggest using shade as method of differentiation (it's simple to try, i recommend it). We already use luminescence mainly for discerning shape, when you throw "shades" into the mix it's usually too subtle for the purpose of differentiation.

Additionally in the physical world how are you going to determine the shade of something relative to something that is not present? i.e if you only have one cable in front of you. We don't have absolute perception, it tends to be affected by context, additionally the lighting now seriously affects your judgement... The reason this is so different to colour is because luminescence is a single receptor type (rods), with which you are trying to compare intensity of an area of one type of signal filled with other detailed information; whereas with colour you have three signal types (cones), in combination and at a lower detail than rods, so it's effectively separate information with at least 2^3 completely distinct permutations to differentiate in almost any lighting or context. This also explains why the absence of only a single cone receptor type has a significant impact on perception since it drops to 2^2 halfing the completely distinct permutations, of which two are merely black and white, so you actually drop from 6 to 2 non-monochromatic permutations - so you see it is far more challenging using either shade or partial cone types.

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