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by vegardx 4389 days ago
Speaking as a colour-blind person (protanopia) I welcome this kind of thoughts with open arms. There's actually not much you have to do in order to make a website at least readable if you just have some basic concepts in mind when designing.

The latest fad with soft pink and grey is really bad, almost unreadable for me. Luckily, I can usually just select the text and get blue/white contrast, which makes it more readable, but lately I've seen people override this too, or simply just hijack the ability to select text. I could open it in a screenreader or something similar, but usually I just close the tap and move along. Just keep that in mind if you decide to override how the browser behaves.

A funny side note, which was very clear on this website: When you're using pie charts, also know that it's almost impossible for colour-blind people to read them. The only two I could pick out was Chrome and IE11.

2 comments

As a person without color-blindness, but is interested in making it easier for people with: there are a lot of different varieties of color blindness. Obviously you can (and usually should) do things like "use different brightnesses", but it seems to me that this is more solvable by e.g. an OS-level color filter. Something that allows you to compress colors into the range you can see.

Would that be even remotely useful? Are there major problems that I'm not seeing? Is that why I don't see OSes with features like that?

You can change contrast, brightness and such in most modern OSes, but I'd rather have people take it into account and choose colours wisely. The problem for most colour-blind people is contrast, not the colours them self.

I can't speak for all colour-blind people, but generally OSes have been really good at it, the problem is usually inside the browser window. And making everything look like a unicorn had puked rainbows all over your screen, while making it very readable, is not comfortable.

> ...usually I just close the tap and move along. Just keep that in mind if you decide to override how the browser behaves.

This makes it a marketing problem as well.