7 ms·

Everything should try do some basic syntax highlighting IMO. Not too much, or it just becomes a sea of formatting that doesn't help at all. It is surprising how

Everything should try do some basic syntax highlighting IMO. Not too much, or it just becomes a sea of formatting that doesn't help at all. It is surprising how much difference just a little splash of colour can make if it isn't overdone. If possible, always include configuration options for the user though, so those with colour-blindness issues can tweak things to their needs, those who are just fussy can make the output fit with their finely adjusted system-wide colour schemes¹, and even better, where you can, allow bold/italic/other as well as colours so that those who barely see colour at all can play too. Of course none of this helps those using screen-readers and other tech, so make sure that all your fancy colouring & such is additive so if it is all “lost” no meaning is absolutely lost with it. -------- [1] Some people can be very vocal about this, more so than if highlighting isn't possible at all. If you give any output formatting they'll expect you to match, or be able to be made to match, their preferred style.

finaard 6mo ago
I'd recommend for every developer to get one or more colourblind friends. I have some, and regularly send them screenshots of what I'm working on to get feedback what they can see and what they can read/can't read. They've been absolutely invaluable for making sure their kind of people can't use my apps properly.
- gortok 6mo ago
  8% of the male population has some form of colorblindness (for women it’s around 0.5%). I have deuteranomaly colorblindness. If you search for images on the internet related to that type of colorblindness you’ll find representations of how we see color and how we see the world. It is not a fun condition to have, and leads to lots of problems in my everyday life. This blog post accidentally accentuated that issue, since the colors are (to what I can understand) very similar looking to me as a colorblind person. 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences, and it’s worth it, if you aren’t color deficient, to try out some of the colorblindness sites and see the world as we do. https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/colour-blindness-experience-it/ https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/colour...
  - gsich 6mo ago
    >1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences, and it’s worth it, if you aren’t color Not the same, it's a gradient.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      Some people lack in vision, some lack in reading and some lack in stopping themselves to reply to comments misunderstanding others.
      - gsich 6mo ago
        [flagged]
        ddingus 6mo ago
        Nope. The greater point here being we definitely benefit when we all understand one another better. Surely that point was not lost, yes?
        embedding-shape 6mo ago
        gortok lack in vision. You lack in reading. And I lack in stopping myself to reply to comments misunderstanding others. I love that I had to explain this :)
  - watwut 6mo ago
    Most color blind men are mildly color blind, plenty even go through their lives without noticing. Yours is on the much stronger side of the things.
    - pc86 6mo ago
      A cousin of mine found out in his late 20's that he is red-green color blind.
      - 6mo ago
- aa-jv 6mo ago
  For sure, but if you don't have any friends, don't discount the value of using tools such as CoBlis: https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/ https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simul... .. to get an idea of the impact of your UI design on color-limited folks out there .. I used this a few times to great effect, it was very revealing to see that my carefully selected teals and ambers were incomprehensible to some folks I really wanted to use my apps .. didn't take much iteration to come to a happy palette though, just needed a bit of care.
- mghackerlady 6mo ago
  Get more than one, someone with red-green and blue-yellow color blindness are going to have completely different experiences
- watwut 6mo ago
  Pro-tip: there are browser extensions able to simulate various kinds of color blindness. That is better then a random friend, because a.) there are various kinds of colorblindness b.) you wont ask the random friend to work for your company for free.
  - cwillu 6mo ago
    On the other hand, the random friend generally has a great deal of experience with what interventions help and don't help. A filter shader generally won't tell you that substituting white for green in a red/green indicator is a great option, or that a colour that they can “see” is still ambiguous when you have to describe it: “I'm clicking the purple button, but it's not doing anything” “Purple? There's no purple in the app!”
- dspillett 6mo ago
  > I'd recommend for every developer to get one or more colourblind friends. In the absence of any naturally occuring colour-blind friends, do you have any tips about surrptitious damaging someone's eyes to create one? :-) Though there are simulation tools avaliable which do a reasonable job, I'll probably stick to those where I have a concern. That feels less drastic.
  - wsc981 6mo ago
    There's apps that can simulate color blindness, which can be used for testing purposes. This is such an app for iOS / macOS: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/
- tosti 6mo ago
  > They've been absolutely invaluable for making sure their kind of people can't use my apps properly. Why would you do that?
  - pc86 6mo ago
    It's obviously a typo (or an excellently delivered joke) but I did get a chuckle out of the idea of someone going out of their way to ask color blind friends for feedback just to do the opposite out of spite for some reason.
    - ddingus 6mo ago
      I thought it was intended and excellent!
- Narew 6mo ago
  Ubisoft release some tools to simulate colorblindness. It's easy to extract de color transformation from their shader directly. I'm not colorblind but I use that quite often to check roughly if the color palette I choose is fine https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
PunchyHamster 6mo ago
As long as you just give people list of settings for colors, they can pick as much color or monochrome as they want. So by all means "color everything", people have different opinions on what they want colored so give them option
cubefox 6mo ago
> Everything should try do some basic syntax highlighting IMO. Interesting idea. So even syntax–highlighting natural language. Grammar highlighting, as it were. Prepositions, verbs, question marks, etc. An LLM could do it. Would it actually improve readability though? Seems likely!
- BigTTYGothGF 6mo ago
  I think that's a good idea, altho you can probably get away with good old NLP to do it.
  - diydsp 6mo ago
    Were in an era where virtually all sw could have an mcp intf to do anything...not even just color.
  - cubefox 6mo ago
    Apparently I was not the first to have this thought. See https://english.edward.io/ https://english.edward.io/ https://github.com/SichangHe/natural_syntax https://github.com/SichangHe/natural_syntax
- bombcar 6mo ago
  I don't even seen the paragraphs anymore, just sentence diagrams! Here's Claud attacking your post: http://schnecke.bombcar.com/random/sentence_diagram.png http://schnecke.bombcar.com/random/sentence_diagram.png
- davidmurdoch 6mo ago
  I always enjoy to find people who think so drastically differently than myself. This sounds like an absolute nightmare to me and I would gauge my eyes out.
  - oblio 6mo ago
    Everything in nature is colored. Our eyes are worse than dinosaur eyes but they can still distinguish millions of colors. We might as well use 5-10-20 for highlights.
ddingus 6mo ago
A screen reader could use various aural means of emphasis that I bet would be as effective as this "color by pattern" idea is. We have pitch, volume, enunciation speed, and for the voice itself the vocal formant frequency can change as can the harmonics. And that is a rich field we are good at differentiating in too. One other screen reader idea I had upon seeing this is to use a brief sound either immediately before or after, maybe even slightly overlapping the vocalization. 30 [30 MS BEEP] CO [30 MS BEEP FOLLOWED BY A SHORT CHIRP THAT INDICATES A KNOWN ADDRESS] Writing that out looks messy. All I can say is the sounds in my head right now make a lot more sense and would compliment the colors nicely.
Sindisil 6mo ago
If it isn't possible to turn any syntax highlighting an the like off, I will personally look for alternatives. Not reconfigure individual settings, turn off syntax highlighting all together. It's not about style for me, it's about readability.

finaard 6mo ago

I'd recommend for every developer to get one or more colourblind friends. I have some, and regularly send them screenshots of what I'm working on to get feedback what they can see and what they can read/can't read. They've been absolutely invaluable for making sure their kind of people can't use my apps properly.

gortok 6mo ago
8% of the male population has some form of colorblindness (for women it’s around 0.5%). I have deuteranomaly colorblindness. If you search for images on the internet related to that type of colorblindness you’ll find representations of how we see color and how we see the world. It is not a fun condition to have, and leads to lots of problems in my everyday life. This blog post accidentally accentuated that issue, since the colors are (to what I can understand) very similar looking to me as a colorblind person. 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences, and it’s worth it, if you aren’t color deficient, to try out some of the colorblindness sites and see the world as we do. https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/colour-blindness-experience-it/ https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/colour...
- gsich 6mo ago
  >1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences, and it’s worth it, if you aren’t color Not the same, it's a gradient.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    Some people lack in vision, some lack in reading and some lack in stopping themselves to reply to comments misunderstanding others.
    - gsich 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      - ddingus 6mo ago
        Nope. The greater point here being we definitely benefit when we all understand one another better. Surely that point was not lost, yes?
      - embedding-shape 6mo ago
        gortok lack in vision. You lack in reading. And I lack in stopping myself to reply to comments misunderstanding others. I love that I had to explain this :)
- watwut 6mo ago
  Most color blind men are mildly color blind, plenty even go through their lives without noticing. Yours is on the much stronger side of the things.
  - pc86 6mo ago
    A cousin of mine found out in his late 20's that he is red-green color blind.
    - 6mo ago
aa-jv 6mo ago
For sure, but if you don't have any friends, don't discount the value of using tools such as CoBlis: https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/ https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simul... .. to get an idea of the impact of your UI design on color-limited folks out there .. I used this a few times to great effect, it was very revealing to see that my carefully selected teals and ambers were incomprehensible to some folks I really wanted to use my apps .. didn't take much iteration to come to a happy palette though, just needed a bit of care.
mghackerlady 6mo ago
Get more than one, someone with red-green and blue-yellow color blindness are going to have completely different experiences
watwut 6mo ago
Pro-tip: there are browser extensions able to simulate various kinds of color blindness. That is better then a random friend, because a.) there are various kinds of colorblindness b.) you wont ask the random friend to work for your company for free.
- cwillu 6mo ago
  On the other hand, the random friend generally has a great deal of experience with what interventions help and don't help. A filter shader generally won't tell you that substituting white for green in a red/green indicator is a great option, or that a colour that they can “see” is still ambiguous when you have to describe it: “I'm clicking the purple button, but it's not doing anything” “Purple? There's no purple in the app!”
dspillett 6mo ago
> I'd recommend for every developer to get one or more colourblind friends. In the absence of any naturally occuring colour-blind friends, do you have any tips about surrptitious damaging someone's eyes to create one? :-) Though there are simulation tools avaliable which do a reasonable job, I'll probably stick to those where I have a concern. That feels less drastic.
- wsc981 6mo ago
  There's apps that can simulate color blindness, which can be used for testing purposes. This is such an app for iOS / macOS: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/
tosti 6mo ago
> They've been absolutely invaluable for making sure their kind of people can't use my apps properly. Why would you do that?
- pc86 6mo ago
  It's obviously a typo (or an excellently delivered joke) but I did get a chuckle out of the idea of someone going out of their way to ask color blind friends for feedback just to do the opposite out of spite for some reason.
  - ddingus 6mo ago
    I thought it was intended and excellent!
Narew 6mo ago
Ubisoft release some tools to simulate colorblindness. It's easy to extract de color transformation from their shader directly. I'm not colorblind but I use that quite often to check roughly if the color palette I choose is fine https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

PunchyHamster 6mo ago

As long as you just give people list of settings for colors, they can pick as much color or monochrome as they want. So by all means "color everything", people have different opinions on what they want colored so give them option

cubefox 6mo ago

> Everything should try do some basic syntax highlighting IMO. Interesting idea. So even syntax–highlighting natural language. Grammar highlighting, as it were. Prepositions, verbs, question marks, etc. An LLM could do it. Would it actually improve readability though? Seems likely!

BigTTYGothGF 6mo ago
I think that's a good idea, altho you can probably get away with good old NLP to do it.
- diydsp 6mo ago
  Were in an era where virtually all sw could have an mcp intf to do anything...not even just color.
- cubefox 6mo ago
  Apparently I was not the first to have this thought. See https://english.edward.io/ https://english.edward.io/ https://github.com/SichangHe/natural_syntax https://github.com/SichangHe/natural_syntax
bombcar 6mo ago
I don't even seen the paragraphs anymore, just sentence diagrams! Here's Claud attacking your post: http://schnecke.bombcar.com/random/sentence_diagram.png http://schnecke.bombcar.com/random/sentence_diagram.png
davidmurdoch 6mo ago
I always enjoy to find people who think so drastically differently than myself. This sounds like an absolute nightmare to me and I would gauge my eyes out.
- oblio 6mo ago
  Everything in nature is colored. Our eyes are worse than dinosaur eyes but they can still distinguish millions of colors. We might as well use 5-10-20 for highlights.

ddingus 6mo ago

A screen reader could use various aural means of emphasis that I bet would be as effective as this "color by pattern" idea is. We have pitch, volume, enunciation speed, and for the voice itself the vocal formant frequency can change as can the harmonics. And that is a rich field we are good at differentiating in too. One other screen reader idea I had upon seeing this is to use a brief sound either immediately before or after, maybe even slightly overlapping the vocalization. 30 [30 MS BEEP] CO [30 MS BEEP FOLLOWED BY A SHORT CHIRP THAT INDICATES A KNOWN ADDRESS] Writing that out looks messy. All I can say is the sounds in my head right now make a lot more sense and would compliment the colors nicely.

Sindisil 6mo ago

If it isn't possible to turn any syntax highlighting an the like off, I will personally look for alternatives. Not reconfigure individual settings, turn off syntax highlighting all together. It's not about style for me, it's about readability.