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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 feedbac

by finaard 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
    Some people lack in vision, some lack in reading and some lack in stopping themselves to reply to comments misunderstanding others.
    - gsich 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      - ddingus 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
    A cousin of mine found out in his late 20's that he is red-green color blind.
    - pdpi 7mo ago
      Had one of those happen in high school — science teacher talking about colour blindness and shows students the colour blindness tests, one student assumes he’s being trolled and that one of the test images was a solid colour.
- dspillett 7mo ago
  > 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences, Almost everyone to an extent loses some colour definition in their vision as we age, even those lucky enough to have excellent colour vision to start with, some lose a lot more than others and it is gradual so mostly not noticed at first. The is one of the reasons many grandparents have the saturation oddly high on their TVs (the other main reason, of course, being they've just never changed it from the default that is picked to make the display “pop” under bright show-room lighting conditions).
- basilgohar 7mo ago
  Thank you both for sharing your lived experience as well as concrete examples for understanding. I, like I am sure many others, live a richer life knowing what others are going through and how I can make tiny adjustments, even if it's just awareness, to account for how others different from in one way or another go through life.
- cyberge99 7mo ago
  Does anyone know of a study done on depression/color blindness.
- dunham 7mo ago
  There is an app for that, too: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ It has a little window you can move over the screen to simulate a few varieties of color blindness.
aa-jv 7mo 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 7mo ago
Get more than one, someone with red-green and blue-yellow color blindness are going to have completely different experiences
watwut 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
    I thought it was intended and excellent!
Narew 7mo 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 7mo ago
[deleted]

by finaard 7mo ago

gortok 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Some people lack in vision, some lack in reading and some lack in stopping themselves to reply to comments misunderstanding others.
  - gsich 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - ddingus 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  A cousin of mine found out in his late 20's that he is red-green color blind.
  - pdpi 7mo ago
    Had one of those happen in high school — science teacher talking about colour blindness and shows students the colour blindness tests, one student assumes he’s being trolled and that one of the test images was a solid colour.
dspillett 7mo ago
> 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences, Almost everyone to an extent loses some colour definition in their vision as we age, even those lucky enough to have excellent colour vision to start with, some lose a lot more than others and it is gradual so mostly not noticed at first. The is one of the reasons many grandparents have the saturation oddly high on their TVs (the other main reason, of course, being they've just never changed it from the default that is picked to make the display “pop” under bright show-room lighting conditions).
basilgohar 7mo ago
Thank you both for sharing your lived experience as well as concrete examples for understanding. I, like I am sure many others, live a richer life knowing what others are going through and how I can make tiny adjustments, even if it's just awareness, to account for how others different from in one way or another go through life.
cyberge99 7mo ago
Does anyone know of a study done on depression/color blindness.
dunham 7mo ago
There is an app for that, too: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ It has a little window you can move over the screen to simulate a few varieties of color blindness.

aa-jv 7mo 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 7mo ago

Get more than one, someone with red-green and blue-yellow color blindness are going to have completely different experiences

watwut 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  I thought it was intended and excellent!

Narew 7mo 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 7mo ago

[deleted]