Ask HN: How do you deal with color blindness?
3 comments
Depends on the field of work. Typically for me (red/green) it just means I need to steer clear of creative work/QA of creative work because I appraise colours differently to many.
Within technical work most of the interfaces I deal with are high contrast, and do not rely on colour in a way that would lead me to get things wrong. There are some issues with documents containing black and dark red text that I can miss. That's solved by telling the author not to mark important changes/highlights in dark red. There's a tracked changes function, there's a highlight function. I am covered.
The more technical my work gets the more I tend to be covered by WCAG 2.2 guidelines. I don't have to do anything based on colour, or report colours during a task often if ever. So as long as I can see the contrast between things I am fine, they can be whatever colour they want.
One thing on colour correction though, you don't have a colourblind person's 'profile'. In fact really, any given healthy person's profile of colour vision is not going to be the same as anothers. A lot of colourblind 'filters' in things like games and apps are barely serviceable. When I use them I find the colour profile I am used to in the wider world flipped, and the semantic meanings given to colours, or their hierarchies, completely changed. Within a UI that often isn't helpful.
My colour blindness causes some frequencies to bleed into each other in my perception of them. That means I struggle in some degree of overlap of red and green to pick out or identify that colour. So make the colour purer for me. Do that with contrast, and saturation. Don't flip it to a set profile or palette. Don't make STOP signs Cyan instead of Red. I CAN see Red, sometimes I struggle when a Green comes along on the edge of its spectral profile and triggers my red cone the same way a similarly fringe red frequency might. But pure Red? Easy, I know that one. Don't do anything to pure (primary) RGB values.
And note that computer monitors are doing all this with RGB, in their own available gamut and brightness/contrast settings, possibly with OS-based HDR setting son or off.
You can try to make a perfect system for every variation but the end user won't see it as precisely as you intend.
Within technical work most of the interfaces I deal with are high contrast, and do not rely on colour in a way that would lead me to get things wrong. There are some issues with documents containing black and dark red text that I can miss. That's solved by telling the author not to mark important changes/highlights in dark red. There's a tracked changes function, there's a highlight function. I am covered.
The more technical my work gets the more I tend to be covered by WCAG 2.2 guidelines. I don't have to do anything based on colour, or report colours during a task often if ever. So as long as I can see the contrast between things I am fine, they can be whatever colour they want.
One thing on colour correction though, you don't have a colourblind person's 'profile'. In fact really, any given healthy person's profile of colour vision is not going to be the same as anothers. A lot of colourblind 'filters' in things like games and apps are barely serviceable. When I use them I find the colour profile I am used to in the wider world flipped, and the semantic meanings given to colours, or their hierarchies, completely changed. Within a UI that often isn't helpful.
My colour blindness causes some frequencies to bleed into each other in my perception of them. That means I struggle in some degree of overlap of red and green to pick out or identify that colour. So make the colour purer for me. Do that with contrast, and saturation. Don't flip it to a set profile or palette. Don't make STOP signs Cyan instead of Red. I CAN see Red, sometimes I struggle when a Green comes along on the edge of its spectral profile and triggers my red cone the same way a similarly fringe red frequency might. But pure Red? Easy, I know that one. Don't do anything to pure (primary) RGB values.
And note that computer monitors are doing all this with RGB, in their own available gamut and brightness/contrast settings, possibly with OS-based HDR setting son or off.
You can try to make a perfect system for every variation but the end user won't see it as precisely as you intend.
> you don't have a colourblind person's 'profile'
Why not? As far as my understanding of color blindness goes, you just need to find a precise transformation matrix and offsets to be able to correct any type of deficiency (except for achromatopsia, I guess).
> When I use them I find the colour profile I am used to in the wider world flipped, and the semantic meanings given to colours, or their hierarchies, completely changed.
I think the correction applied to digital content is a positive thing. At once you can perceive color the way it was intended to be perceived. May be wrong here because I don't have daltonism.
> You can try to make a perfect system for every variation but the end user won't see it as precisely as you intend.
My goal is not cover every case, but to create exactly one profile (and perhaps create a usable correction workflow for someone else)
Thanks for an elaborate response :)
Why not? As far as my understanding of color blindness goes, you just need to find a precise transformation matrix and offsets to be able to correct any type of deficiency (except for achromatopsia, I guess).
> When I use them I find the colour profile I am used to in the wider world flipped, and the semantic meanings given to colours, or their hierarchies, completely changed.
I think the correction applied to digital content is a positive thing. At once you can perceive color the way it was intended to be perceived. May be wrong here because I don't have daltonism.
> You can try to make a perfect system for every variation but the end user won't see it as precisely as you intend.
My goal is not cover every case, but to create exactly one profile (and perhaps create a usable correction workflow for someone else)
Thanks for an elaborate response :)
I have moderate red/green colorblindness. I ended up getting some Enchroma glasses and it has really changed my world for the better. I always knew I was colorblind, but had no way of actually knowing what I was missing until now. Before I got the glasses I would tend to do my best effort on things and then ask a co-worker if anything needed tweaking.
There are some color correction options in OSes and games, but they do not cover the full spectrum of color blindness.
One current solution I am investigating is using ICC profiles to perform correction, perhaps you can tell me whether this is feasible/efficient.