I just am not so fond of the idea that all designs must be compromised (both aesthetically and functionally) for everyone else, if there are solutions that work as well without affecting everyone.
There are SO MANY designs that use indistinguishable colors for no good reason at all. It's perverse that League of Legends uses blue and purple as its team colors—literally anything else (blue and red is my vote) would be easier for many colorblind users to tell apart. And a lot of heatmaps use gradients that go from blue to purple or from red to green…why‽
I'm willing to admit that the very occasional design might Really Just Work Better with particular colorblind-incompatible colors, but I feel like I'm being affected by it awfully frequently. The primary point of design is to communicate information; why restrict a substantial minority from easy access to that information?
IIRC, they even use that mode for their E-sports tournament streams - but I might be wrong on that as I haven't watched any LoL tournaments in quite some time.
E: Just tuned into the EU LCS to take a screenshot - and it has colorblind mode on: https://vgy.me/ijQgrR.png
When I was in elementary school, you had to special order large print text books, audio books were available, but required special tapes & players. A portable CCTV could be used to magnify small print. All of this equipment was specialized, expensive and hard to come by for most people. All of this has been replaced by features built into my phone. Special shoutouts to the "Zoom" app on iOS, that thing has color filters for people with color sensitivity issues and enhanced text rendering for small print (unfortunately, it's buggy and crashes sometimes), but it is much better than littering my camera roll with random pictures of menus or the bottom of routers just so I can zoom in on some numbers.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjHzLUnHeM0
I wonder if perhaps he would be better served by simply using the actual "Delta E" metric, specifically ΔE*₀₀, which doesn't have this symmetry problem?
PS. Sexy interactive color matrix table. Small error in the text below -- values >=40 are highlighted, not >45.
Well the only thing I know about DeltaE I know from Bruce Lindbloom's website, where he uses the terms interchangably. http://brucelindbloom.com/Eqn_DeltaE_CMC.html
But I'm happy to try out the CIELAB deltaE as well. I can already see another dropdown for comparing difference metrics coming up :)
Will fix the text error you found.
--edit: after reading again I see that he used DeltaE as a sort of broader category. worth fixing as well
One suggestion for designers & developers who need to be ADA-compliant: part of the spec is the level of contrast between different colors. We currently use WebAIM to check our color contrast: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
I'd recommend looking at the contrast levels needed to achieve ADA compliance, or any other compliance needed depending on the regulations in various countries, to make it easy for designers & devs.
I mean, it seems to me the sort of thing that a computer ought to know how to deal with, inherently .. and sure, some vendors do make an effort to make these kinds of human differences accessible.
But its just .. well maybe there is a broader malaise with OS vendors, asleep at the wheel, not caring too much about this on the OS level any more. We've moved on and its all web now, I guess.
I say this, as my first thought while reading this article was "surely this is just a hash-table away from being applicable everywhere ..." ..
While implementing the UI for a medical device I had the disappointing experience of having to work with a UX company that designed an interface that relied almost exclusively on colors to indicate results and state (red, green, orange, blue, yellow...). When I pointed out that the color blind would not be able to understand their color-based system they refused to make any changes -- not even adding distinct icons for distinct results. These people claim to be UX specialists for medical devices.
It's ok for switching between different color modes so I can see differences in them.
I am intrigued by the Enchroma glasses, haven't wanted to gamble $300+ on them yet.
I'm also a very heavy F.lux user, so all my color choices have to be usable with an orange filter as well.
Also, the problem space is one that I haven't thought about, but probably should. After all, accessibility should be important to all of us.
If you didn't want to do separate palettes, which I imagine could be a lot of work, you could create your own. I imagine if you varied the tint/shade/tone enough you could (probably?) get a set of colors (with different hues) that would be differentiable across all forms of colorblindness.
Disclaimer: I'm not a designer _at all_. Somewhat on topic, my favorite quick tool for colors is colorhexa dot com. At the bottom of each color page they have a color blindness simulator.
