R/G colorblind here. This is simply the best writing about my color vision deficit I have ever read. The charge status LED thing makes me crazy and I now wonder if I could use diffusion/ground glass or film over the LED with a little gap to, in effect, enlarge the color field of an LED so that I can better discern the color.
Color blindness
31–40 of 165 posts
Re: Color blindness
#32I didn't know he was color blind. I can't help but connect this to his famous disdain for syntax highlighting and colored text: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...
I usually ignore syntax highlighting. I can't see it well because it's tiny, and because the "designers" usually chose colors that are tough to distinguish, and sometimes very difficult to see at all. For instance, the default console colors in Ubuntu are TERRIBLE (maybe for everyone). The output of 'ls' uses blue letters on a black background for some type of file, and I literally cannot see those. Ditto for some er…
I wrote a small DSL editor before and I had to fight extremely hard to get a theme that made the semantic highlighting legible.
I like pretty things too, but they also need to be functional.
Re: Color blindness
#33Great article. Ummm... dumb question, but... stars are colored? (Color blind poster here).
Yes. I still see the colors of stars, but it's like a pale color. They are mostly white, but some tend toward red, others yellow, others blue. There's definitely a difference. When I see Mars, it is definitely more red, especially so when it is closer.
But I distinctly remember my young eyes, probably when I was 4, that the the stars had a lot more color than they do now. I remember talking about it with my mother while she was driving one night.
I score fairly high on color acuity tests, and gravitated toward a job in color printing in my 20s, and learned color management. I matched so many colors in CMYK and CMYKOG by hand, because the color models used to calculate color differences and tolerances do a poor job of modeling the response of the human eye to color. Since then the models have improved, but they still need work. Given what this article describes, this makes complete sense. You are mapping two very different mathematical spaces from one to the other. One based around specific pigments with specific values, and the other based around differential curves between color receptors with overlapping ranges.
Re: Color blindness
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
The poster's question should be interpreted as: can the color of the stars be distinguished with the naked eye?
Again, yes. Particularly in clusters, I can detect differences in the colors of stars.
Wow - sounds like you have more sensitive than average color perception.
Do you think you might be a tetrachromat?
Re: Color blindness
#35I'm red-green colorblind but the only way it noticeably affects my life these days is with the icons on Github's notifications page. A merged PR an an open PR have different shapes and the merged PR is blue and the open PR is green --- very easy to distinguish.
But an open PR and a closed PR have identical shapes and are only distinguished by the open PR being green and the closed PR being red. Or so I'm told anyway, because I cannot for the life of me distinguish between the two. I end up needing to just open the link to the PR to check its status.
Re: Color blindness
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, yes. Particularly in clusters, I can detect differences in the colors of stars.
Wow - sounds like you have more sensitive than average color perception. Do you think you might be a tetrachromat?
Nope. It probably helps to live away from cities and such, in that there's a lot of stars visible at night. And it's not like looking at a rainbow: they're tints, not intense color differences.
'endogui linked to an article that talks about this: I don't think it's all that unusual.
Re: Color blindness
#37I had a woodshop/electronics shop teacher in high school with severe red/green blindness. He said at stop lights the only reason he knew which was green and which was red was because of the layout. But when he went to states with sideways lights, he'd just wait until the people behind him honked until he figured out which was red and which was green.
But as an electronics teacher, it was extra problematic, because resistors are labeled by color bands. So he would constantly quiz us on that by randomly asking us what the resistance was, because he needed to know for his own projects!
He also said a lot of warning labels on woodshop equipment was bad because they depended on being able to tell the difference between R and G.
I learned very early in life that any UI that uses red and green as a differentiator is bad.
Re: Color blindness
#38I'm red-green colorblind but the only way it noticeably affects my life these days is with the icons on Github's notifications page. A merged PR an an open PR have different shapes and the merged PR is blue and the open PR is green --- very easy to distinguish. But an open PR and a closed PR have identical shapes and are only distinguished by the open PR being green and the closed PR being red. Or so I'm told anyway,…
The closed PR icon has a tiny little tickmark in the icon I believe.
I had never realized they had different colors btw, and always wondered why GitHub wouldn't give them different colors. Thanks for clarifying that they actually did, just badly.
Tip for anyone using red and green for statuses: do like traffic lights: make the green a whiteish, blueish green and make the red tend a bit towards orange. And for the love of god use wildly different icon shapes!
Re: Color blindness
#39Great article. Ummm... dumb question, but... stars are colored? (Color blind poster here).
Is it obvious to everyone else? Do colored dots stand out in the sky? Or is it a subtle thing?
It is subtle and to the naked eye, at a quick glance, the stars in the night sky are all little white dots.
Not a mass of little coloured dots.
Re: Color blindness
#40Not colorblind (my father was) but I appreciated his brief “old eyes” discussion at the end. I’m 42 and have been using a computer since I was 6. Now I’m both nearsighted (since I was 8) and farsighted (since my late 30s), which means I can’t read without glasses of some kind. Similarly, “light mode” is far easier to use and more legible than “dark mode” despite the recent trendiness of the latter. I can also back up his exhortation to not use the thinnest possible lines for text.
4K monitors have been a blessing, not directly (though they sure are nice) but because they’ve brought good fonts and UI scaling into the general use case.