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New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind

scientificamerican.com

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Re: New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind

#41

Post by mark-r »

zck wrote: post #33
mark-r wrote: post #31

They claim that the new scale gives a continuum from dark to light, but if you look at the example it goes dark at both ends with the brightest colors in the exact middle. Why the discrepancy?

I don't think it does. The picture here: https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/UPj... is CVD-Jet, not their new scale. The blue-and-yellow rightmost picture is described as "as a person with red-green color blindness sees the rainbow image [in the center]". This scale does put the brightest colors in the center. Their proposed scale, cividis, does not have a brightness in the middle of the scale. I…

Thanks. They sure made it confusing with their choice of examples then.

Re: New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind

#42

Post by wcfields »

Semi-related tid-bit: You'd be shocked how many theatrical lighting designers over the age of 45 are color blind. Never used to be a workplace issue since there was only a limited number of gels to place over lights and even then they were all numbered / catalog.

With LEDs being able to project (nearly) any color the old-guard are facing some challenges.

Re: New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind

#43

Post by Derbasti »

About 8% of all males are color-blind. If you are a scientist, and want to publish your work, there's a one in four chance that at least one of your three reviewers is color-blind.

Rainbow color schemes are ridiculously bad. One study showed that medical professionals who look at rainbow-themed plots every day, immediately made fewer errors if presented with a simple grayscale plot instead, despite not having any experience with the grayscale color scheme.

Add to that that human perception is much better at seeing high-frequency lightness contrast than color contrast. Color contrasts are better-suited for categorical data.

Re: New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind

#45

Post by kqr »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #13

I've been using Color Oracle [1] to simulate colour-blindness as part of my standard developer workflow recently. For such a common disability, it's shocking how little work most people put into ensuring accessibility for colour-blind people. [1] https://colororacle.org/

If you have an Android phone, you can also go into the developer settings, turn on a colour blindness simulation, launch the camera, and then point it at anything (in the real world, or on a monitor) and see an idea of what it might be like to a colour blind person.

Re: New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind

#46

Post by nbsd4life »

Derbasti wrote: post #43

About 8% of all males are color-blind. If you are a scientist, and want to publish your work, there's a one in four chance that at least one of your three reviewers is color-blind. Rainbow color schemes are ridiculously bad. One study showed that medical professionals who look at rainbow-themed plots every day, immediately made fewer errors if presented with a simple grayscale plot instead, despite not having any exp…

> there's a one in four chance

Closer to 1 in 7, because the reviewer might be female (who are rarely color blind).

Re: New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind

#47

Post by LambdaComplex »

nonane wrote: post #39
sogen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have Java installed? It works for me. There's another app from a Japanese lab but can't remember the name.

I can see the app running - but doesn't change the display when I select a simulator option from the drop down menu. Will play around with it. Thanks!

Maybe it's working just fine but you're already colorblind ;)

Re: New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind

#48

Post by bradknowles »

nbsd4life wrote: post #46
Derbasti wrote: post #43

About 8% of all males are color-blind. If you are a scientist, and want to publish your work, there's a one in four chance that at least one of your three reviewers is color-blind. Rainbow color schemes are ridiculously bad. One study showed that medical professionals who look at rainbow-themed plots every day, immediately made fewer errors if presented with a simple grayscale plot instead, despite not having any exp…

> there's a one in four chance Closer to 1 in 7, because the reviewer might be female (who are rarely color blind).

Closer to 1 in 4, because sadly there are very few reviewers who are female.

Re: New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind

#49

Post by Sharlin »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #23

With just two colours it's hard to see the intermediate values because our eyes tend to blur together colours; is that an intermediate value or sharp edge that I'm seeing fuzzily due to poor focus? With an intermediate tone, such issues are pushed down to lower resolutions - with yellow-red-blue I know for sure that if it's red it's an intermediate, but is the orange area a mix of lots of small yellow and red domains…

Any scale that only uses hue is terrible, no matter how many intermediate steps. Scales that only accidentally utilize luminance (due to human vision being most sensitive to green, then red, and by far the least sensitive to blue) are only marginally better. Indeed, the rainbow scale is atrocious also due to the perceptually most luminous color being somewhere in the middle of the range, so people with red-green deficiency cannot even easily use luminance cues to make sense of the data. Not even mentioning the fact that human vision is simply much better at distinguishing luminance differences than hue differences.

Re: New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind

#50

Post by Terr_ »

Terr_ wrote: post #3

This reminds me of CubeHelix [0], which aims to create scales which degrade gracefully to grayscale, which also minimizes potential color-blindness issues. [0] https://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/

P.S.: Visual examples: https://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/cubewedges.html
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