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Make figures and presentations that are friendly to Colorblind people (2002)

jfly.uni-koeln.de

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Re: Make figures and presentations that are friendly to Colorblind people (2002)

#31

Post by danShumway »

convolvatron wrote: post #29
danShumway wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I worry about here that I should probably do more research on: is colorblindness like turning off or lessening a color channel? Because I know for some graphical work I've done, if I do a pure grayscale by just turning down the saturation or something, the contrast might be good, but if I turn off one color channel, the contrast/intensity differences sometimes seem to vanish. I do grayscale testing, but I w…

part of the issue here is while the physical mechanism of colorblindness is quite clear, the perceptual implications are inherently subjective. so I don't know how much my advice is relevant to colorblind people in general. but greyscale is very good start. after that - if you want to show contrast at least for me there are whole areas of the palette that you don't want to take more than one color from. for example t…

That is super helpful. I've done a little bit of research on this, but apparently not nearly enough because I haven't really thought that much before about the distraction angle at all; I assumed if I got the contrast right for everyone, that there just wouldn't be any other problems with color.

I guess this is a good argument for not just testing in grayscale, but at least thinking about actually shipping the grayscale mode or individual color channel adjusters. Because I know in a worst case scenario that a grayscale test will be accurate to what people see if I provide a toggle that turns it on in the final product.

Just... yeah, to your point, need to make sure that whatever colorblind mode is shipped is actually an improvement :)

Re: Make figures and presentations that are friendly to Colorblind people (2002)

#32

Post by arthur2e5 »

mpetroff wrote: post #23
junon wrote: post #12

Question for color blind users: Does testing with the various color emulation tools (such as those provided by inspector tools) properly emulate the real thing? It always seems like people (including me) trust them at face value but I've never heard either way if they're actually helpful in creating color-blindness aware UIs. Of course it would always be preferable to test with real users with real disabilities, but…

The simulation technique [1] currently used by the Firefox / Chrome dev tools is reasonable, so it's definitely much better than not checking for color vision deficiency accessibility at all. Ideally, color should only be used for progressive enhancement; if your UI can be used in grayscale, it's probably fine. However, the method originally used by both browsers, which is also used by some other tools, had no scient…

What was the original method may I ask? Some… basic RGB mixing?

Re: Make figures and presentations that are friendly to Colorblind people (2002)

#33

Post by arthur2e5 »

zimpenfish wrote: post #11
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just contrast. It's also font size. It's also the font itself. All websites should be readable in Firefox or Safari (or Chrome but I don't use that) with the minimum font size set larger than the default. I use 18 min and a lot of stuff breaks. I'm sure that other people would greatly benefit from even larger fonts. I don't care about "pretty". I'm resigned to not getting that. But a lot of text simply disap…

> Just how fucking hard would it be for Apple to let me choose my own font in Safari? Technically not "let me choose my own font in Safari" but you can set a user style sheet which overrides fonts. https://kgrz.io/safari-custom-user-agent-css-overrides-using...

Tangential: it would be nice if `@font-face sans-serif { … }` (likewise for other generic families) was a thing in user-injected stylesheets. Especially when you don’t have such options in UI.

Re: Make figures and presentations that are friendly to Colorblind people (2002)

#34

Post by mpetroff »

arthur2e5 wrote: post #32
mpetroff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simulation technique [1] currently used by the Firefox / Chrome dev tools is reasonable, so it's definitely much better than not checking for color vision deficiency accessibility at all. Ideally, color should only be used for progressive enhancement; if your UI can be used in grayscale, it's probably fine. However, the method originally used by both browsers, which is also used by some other tools, had no scient…

What was the original method may I ask? Some… basic RGB mixing?

It applied a linear transform to RGB values, like the current method, but the original matrices were the "colorjack.com matrices" [1] that have been floating around the internet for a while. They weren't derived scientifically and are quite inaccurate, at least for protanopia.

[1] https://github.com/MaPePeR/jsColorblindSimulator#the-colorma...

Re: Make figures and presentations that are friendly to Colorblind people (2002)

#35

Post by 1MachineElf »

We have technical specialists at my company who developed a great visualization interface for our product. Everyone who has seen it is really impressed. They ask why we can't have nice visualization tools like this built-in. The main engineering team won't adopt the solution because the graphs are red/green instead of gradients of blue. The technical specialists believe we shouldn't make the blue gradient the default, and instead believe that because color blind people are a minority, a mode that works for them should be a later add-on. I understand where they are coming from, but personally, I think it would be great to have the out-of-the-box UI be useful for colorblind people. The weird thing is, the two teams have had this difference for several months now, and haven't done anything about it. Unfortunately, it just seems like the most talented developers are just apathetic towards this. Almost like the brain space our design team devotes to ADA compatibility is in th specialists mind devoted to actually making something useful. It's an odd dynamic.
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