Living with color blindness feels like the world is constantly tricking you in subtle and disturbing ways.
The other day I was booking a kayak trip, trying to figure out which dates were the cheapest by looking at the low fare calendar. Do you see any problems?
Oh, sorry – that’s what it looks like to me. You will likely see it more like this.
I opened Chrome Dev Tools, changed the colors of the cheap pricing to something I could actually see, and finally booked my ride. A few weeks later, I went to the airport. Conveniently, the parking structure has added colored lights to help find empty parking spaces. Or so they say? They all look the same to me.
It took a little longer, but I found a parking spot. Waiting at the gate, maybe I’ll kill some time on my phone. But why is this picture of an ordinary chili pepper at the top of Reddit? Or this paper? correct.
For some people, color blindness is a huge liability that closes the doors to career dreams. It’s hard to become a pilot, train conductor, or pathologist if you can’t distinguish colors in important instruments, signals, or tissue samples. For others, it seriously affects their daily ability to do their jobs, like surveyors spotting flags, doctors looking at dermatology, or electricians looking for colored wires.
But to me, it’s just a lifelong series of needlessly confusing interactions that shows the world wasn’t designed for people like me.
There are an estimated 350 million color blind people in the world. About 8 percent of men, roughly 1 in 12, have some form of color vision deficiency. (It’s genetic, so numbers vary from region to region.) My mom’s color vision is worse than mine, which is unusual: Only about 0.5 percent of women globally are colorblind, about 1 in 200.
I’ve had a lot of conversations about my color blindness with people who aren’t color blind. (Pro tip: When you meet someone who is colorblind, don’t point to objects repeatedly and ask what color they are.) The very idea of colorblindness seems hard to conceive.
Despite what many people think, I can see most colors! My world is not a black and white movie. Color blindness, or total color blindness, is much rarer, affecting about 1 in 30,000 people. (Unless you were born on the Pinjelap atoll in the South Pacific, where 10 percent of the population has inherited the gene.)
Ninety-nine percent of people who are colorblind, like me, have some form of red-green color blindness. I was born with the most common type, deuteranopia, a genetic mutation that affects the ability of the environmentally sensitive cones in my eyes to absorb light.
As a result, some shades of green and red look similar to each other, converging on a muddy brown. Other colors can look very similar, such as shades of purple, blue, orange, bright green, or even pink and gray. People with other types of color blindness will confuse different colours.
For example, at a glance, except for other context clues like texture and toppings, avocado toast and peanut butter toast look pretty much the same to me.
Apparently, this is disgusting to people? This is my life.
Because red and green are complementary colors on the color wheel, they have become the default colors for every designer who wants to represent opposites: right and wrong, high and low, stop and go.
Annoyingly, these are also the two colors most likely to be confused by people with color vision deficiencies.
I wish every designer in the world would understand this and switch to, say, red and blue for color opposition. But I know that won’t happen: the cultural meaning is too ingrained.
He constantly asks me if I’ve tried EnChroma glasses, corrective glasses made famous in a series of viral videos where colorblind people try them on and automatically start crying at the wonders of seeing grass for the first time.
Despite the hype, their corrective lenses actually do not Repair color blind. they correct By increasing the contrast and saturation of colors, they turn your color palette into something visible, but they can’t help you see colors you can’t see physically. As a result, the reviews are pretty uneven, with some people loving them but many people reporting that they do little but darken or color their vision.
And for me, it’s not an option at all. EnChroma offers color blind glasses with prescription lenses, but my prescription is too strong to use.
Besides, why do people with color blindness have to buy expensive glasses for that operate in the world When can designers make very small changes that make a huge difference to a large group of people?
This is the most frustrating thing about these accessibility issues – they are very much avoidable!
In design, whether in the digital or physical worlds, color should not be the only indicator of meaning. Simple test: if your work is converted to greyscale, will it still be usable?
At the very least, use a tool like ColorBrewer to find a color-blind-safe palette so you don’t accidentally end up designing a map like this one, which looks to me like the American Midwest is in the middle of a purge.
There is no shortage of color blindness simulators, both free and commercial. It even comes integrated with Google Chrome, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. But in my experience, none of them exactly represent my vision. (DaltonLens is the closest).
These emulators are useful tools, but relying solely on them is a one-dimensional approach to accessibility. If there is any uncertainty, adding labels, icons, or textures for each meaningful color in your design will make it accessible to many people, regardless of their color perception ability.
The last time I wrote about color blindness was 12 years ago. The good news is that things are getting better. More and more, I’m seeing apps and games adding color-blind modes or transforming their palettes to be more color-blind friendly.
when Between us It was launched in 2018, and it was extremely difficult for color blind people to play. Each character model looks the same, only distinguished by color. Players will use colors to identify other players in the voice chat. Someone might say “green mite” – But which is green?
Someone might say “green mite” – But which is green?
In addition, the game’s wiring tasks, in which players have to reconnect wires of the same color to their corresponding terminals, require normal color vision to finish. For me, it was just trial and error. I felt left out from the moment I started playing.
It took years of complaints before developers added icons to colored wires in late 2020. An update in June 2022 finally offered the option to display color names on characters.
In contrast with Wardle, the viral sensation created by Josh Wardle as a love letter to his partner, which was released in 2021. The game shipped with a colorblind mode on the first day. The default colors are hard for me to see, but the color blindness support made it instantly available.
I asked Wardle what inspired him to add the feature. “I think it would have been easy to do to make more people feel included,” he replied, but he quickly admitted that he could have done more. so said he, Wardle I have a bunch of accessibility issues—which I was ignorant of, which I regret.” (Wardle It may have shipped with a colorblind mode, but it was invalid for blind players, people who share Wardle It floods those who use screen readers with useless, colorful emoji names.)
Accessibility in design is a form of empathy: trying to reach beyond your own perspective to try to understand other people who, in this case, very literally don’t see the world the same way you do.
Relevant enough, designing for accessibility is not black and white, one feature you choose to build in or not, but a spectrum as broad and colorful as the people you design for.