I'm r/g colorblind, and suddenly the indistinguishability of small colored objects makes sense now.
Wow. Okay then.
I hate multicolor LEDs with a passion. Those little amber or green dots look identical to me, even when you put them side by side. I use a phone app that uses the camera and shows me RGB values at a reticule. I've gone through rack and racks of equipment with that app, looking for things like dead drives and errored-out ports. Back in the 80s, I borrowed the eyes of cow-orkers (with the cow-orker still attached).
My wife was a PM on a project once, and asked what I thought of a bit of UI. The designers had replaced a set of small status icons with colored dots (green=ok, red=bad, puce=alerting, etc.). I explained that I could not distinguish them. They didn't believe me; it took that team about five months to come up with a UI that made sense (the same icons, but with colored, duh).
I'm also Red-green colourblind, and also use a mobile app to check RGB values of things! I also use a Windows traybar app that I wrote with Delphi about 15 years ago, which gives me a dropper I can use anywhere in the screen to see RGB values.
I've also noticed that it's much more difficult to differentiate tones and colours of small objects.
Cues were mentioned in the article, and I think I subconsciously rely on these a lot. For example, with traffic lights I know what the colours should be from top to bottom, and so I "see" them as the right colours - yet if you took photos showing only the colours in the abstract, I couldn't tell any difference between red and amber, and indeed I wouldn't be able to accurately tell you what colour any of them was.
Something people find interesting is that I often don't know what colour something is, but I'm often able to narrow it down to 2 or 3 choices - usually based on context and other cues, and also based on how I know I can misperceive colours. For example, I know I often see pink as grey, so if you showed me something pink, I might think it was "pink, or grey or green".
Another random anecdote that demonstrates the use of cues: years ago we had an old CRT TV, and every now and then it would suddenly display only in black and white. It really annoyed my wife, but I never even noticed - I guess in my head I "saw" someone's coat as red, for example. My mind just kind of filled in the blanks, like I suppose it must always do.
-At a former employer, I volunteered - as in, bullied my way into - the test group for our SCADA GUI front-ends.
This resulted in palettes for both deuteranopes and tritanopes; our support staff on occasion had calls from customers who had inadvertently activated one of the color schemes for the chromatographically challenged - they typically went along the lines of 'Did you nincompoops have some colorblind sod do your GUIs?'
-'Matter of fact, we did. Would you like me to put you through to him?'
This article was a fascinating and informative read for me.
The author (who I assume is male, I don't remember if he said so outright) kept repeating how colour is perceived based on the difference between receptor signals. I had learned that already so I kept thinking, "yeah yeah, I know"...
... Then he got to the point about edge detection, and suddenly I understood! I never thought before about how the difference is calculated between receptors that are not precisely co-located on the retina. Of course! Seems obvious in retrospect but I never thought about it. That also makes many colour-optical illusions make more sense.
If the author comes across these comments -- I have full colour vision and unusually good eyesight. Even for me, without magnification the stars are not colourful. Mars is slightly red, Betelgeuse is very slightly red, the milky way has a slightly bluish tinge, but for the most part, the stars are just white points. They do sometimes shimmer / twinkle briefly between different colours in a way that can make it really hard to say what exact colour they are, even if I stare at them. You probably notice that too, though. So I don't think your experience of the stars is likely to be that different, and you shouldn't feel sad!
I'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.
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!
Not 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.
The research I'm aware of has shown that light backgrounds help people with astigmatism because they cause constriction of the pupils to adapt to the increased light coming in given low ambient light, which brings things into sharper focus for those with astigmatism.
Of course not constricting the pupils is a major reason people like dark mode, and mobile devices have greatly increased the use of screens in environments with low ambient light. I suspect the only good solution is to support both light and dark modes universally.
I've got mild red-green colorblindness (less severe than the author's); this article is great, and goes into much more detail than I knew beforehand. If I could add some suggestions to the author's at the end:
* First, if you have the option of using one or the other, do so. Like, you can use red, blue, yellow, purple, and black for lines on a graph before you even need to find an additional color like green.
* Second, highly saturated ("computer" red/green) are easy to distinguish (for me, anyway, and it sounds like the author as well). So they're preferable to less saturated versions of red and green, if you need to use both.
For me, the most difficult reds and greens to distinguish are in the pastel range.
* Additionally, if you're designing UI for a program (game or whatever) with colorblindness options, PLEASE do not label the options with the medical names only ("deuteranopia", "protanopia", "tritanopia"). I don't know what the latin word for the medical condition of red-green colorblind is, I just know I have the relatively common kind of red-green colorblindness. I'd guess most people who aren't doctors are in a similar boat. Labels that include the color-distinction difficulty and relative commonality would be most useful to me, e.g., "red-green (MOST COMMON — deuteranopia)", "red-green (LESS COMMON — protanopia)", and "blue-yellow (EXTREMELY RARE — tritanopia)".
How about this for selecting. Colour scheme: just display a colourblind was test and ask the user to select the one they can or can't read. Then you don't have to rely on them knowing what the different types are at all.
To add to your suggestions: avoid referring to colors on a chart by name. While it may be able to identify the difference between two colors (e.g. by intensity), it may not be possible to identify the color. In my case, identifying blue and purple are frequently difficult. Presumably this is because purple is a mixture of blue and red.
> First, if you have the option of using one or the other, do so. Like, you can use red, blue, yellow, purple, and black for lines on a graph before you even need to find an additional color like green.
I don't see this advice getting much uptake.
First, green isn't a second thought for people with normal vision. It's a first thought. I can understand how this wouldn't be true if, to you, it didn't exist.
Second, the color space without green is harder to draw contrasts in than the color space with green.
Third, a friend of mine with red/green colorblindness always complained that he couldn't tell the difference between blue ("rare") and purple ("epic") items in World of Warcraft. (WoW has since solved this problem by throwing out the concept of item quality entirely, but the colors are still there anyway.)
So you're advising that people should make a quite unnatural choice, which will markedly reduce usability for almost everyone, but which won't actually solve the problem for the colorblind. It's just not a move that makes sense.
> It has to do with edge detection. The signals from receptors in the eye are used not only to detect color, but also to detect edges. In fact since color is detected largely by differences of spectral response from nearby receptors, the edges are important because that's where the strongest difference lies. The color of a region, especially a small one, is largely determined at the edges.
Aha! So that is why I have the hardest time with line charts even when I distinguish the colors in the legend just fine!
I wrote an app that aimed to simulate vision impairments, including types of colour blindness.
The idea is that the designer or developer can point their iPhone/iPad at design to get some idea of what it might be like for someone else to view it.
>> Maybe I can help you understand how that impairment—and it is an impairment, however mild...
This is actually a slightly controversial claim. While r/g color-blind individuals do have difficulty viewing colors, they seem to have an easier time seeing through camouflage:
A study on the ability to distinguish tones of khaki:
There is strong anecdotal evidence that color-blind men specifically recruited during the world wars to see camouflage: (I have personally heard such an anecdote).
And a short YouTube video on the ability of color-blind monkeys to forage for insects, whereas the monkeys with color-vision are better able to find ripe red fruit:
I suspect that if we lived in a world where the color-blind were the majority, it would be those with color-vision who wrote about their 'impairment'. Perhaps with a note about how video games often contain almost-impossible tasks to discern camouflage. (In the real world, video games often contain tasks that require the ability to discern colors that I find difficult due to my r/g colorblindness).
Well, there used to be jokes about stupid women seeing non existent color differences and making big deal about them. As in women being crazy and their husbands rational having to deal with that.
Meanwhile, color blindness in overwhelmingly make issue.
Normal trichromats read Ishihara plates using their L- and M-cones. Red-green color vision defective observers rely on S-cone and luminance signals in reading the plates. Some normal trichromats can read the hidden digit plates because they can extract S-cone signal difference efficiently despite the distraction from L- and M-cones.
Well sure. I would also assume that if we lived in a world where most people were wheelchair bound, people not in a wheelchair would be at a disadvantage.
This is such a detailed description of the issues caused by red/green color blindness.
I've had some issues in the past specifically related to small red and green boxes. When you do some operations work you'll eventually run into a chart like this [0] and, during an outage, you'll undoubtedly not be able to notice a scattering of small red boxes in this type of visualization. Similar with line charts. Telling the difference between 2 lines on a graph that are not thick is difficult especially now that people have migrated to higher DPI displays.
> That is a worthwhile endeavor, and the people writing them mean well, but I suspect very few of them are color-blind because the advice is often poor and sometimes wrong. The most common variety of color blindness is called red-green color blindness, or deuteranopia, and it affects about 6% of human males.
This is frustrating. He's trying to correct misconceptions and then he immediately gets the word wrong. What he's describing is 'deuteranomaly'. The term 'deuteranopia' applies to the more severe form of colourblindness shown in his diagram (a); it's a form of true dichromacy.
I 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.
I remember driving one night alone in a rural area with sideways stoplights. I didn't realize it until one turned red on me, until then I just saw a weird light ahead. At least red is clear to me so I would stop.
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.
Somewhat unrelated story, but I used to be in astronomy and two friends of mine were once on an observing run together. Observing can sometimes be a bit dull and as you're getting night shifted it's hard to do anything productive while you're waiting for the exposures to finish. So you're looking for ways to pass the time.
Anyway, somehow my two friends started looking at color blindness tests. One of them had grown up in Latin America and hadn't seen a color blindness test before, so the other was explaining how there's a number in the center that you can't see if you're color blind. And he said... "what number?" That was how he learned at age 26 that he was color blind.
A color-blind poster here - this month has been the first time that I've noticed colors in stars (or planet, specifically).
Mars is very close and red these days, which I hadn't noticed before. I got quite giddy when I first saw a "colored dot" in the sky a few days ago and now most of my evening runs are motivated by getting a glimpse of the bright red planet. :)
A few weeks more until it starts rising early and isn't distinguishable anymore.
They are almost impossible to tell apart in a lit sky.
When the sky is dark, red stars are very distinctive, I don't think even color blind people would have a problem. (I am color blind, but I confuse blue and green, not red and green.)
Both yellow and blue stars emit blueish and yellowish light, and are much harder to tell apart.
As an added bonus, red stars are the first to disappear against a lit sky :(
> "The color of a star, as determined by the most intense frequency of the visible light, depends on the temperature of the star's outer layers, including its photosphere."
Stars mostly look white to me (or very light yellow or blue) and I‘m fairly confident I have standard color vision — but I’m nearsighted and have mild strabismus, so they look pretty bad unless I’m using a telescope. :(
> "First, choose colors that can be easily distinguished. If possible, keep them far apart on the spectrum. If not, differentiate them some other way, such as by intensity or saturation."
Because "keep them far apart" on the spectrum might not be helpful when taken litereally, here is a link to Lines of Confusion Diagrams im CIE 1932 color space.
> "Second, use other cues if possible. Color is complex, so if you can add another component to a line on a graph, such as a dashed versus dotted pattern, or even good labeling, that helps a lot."
I find this easier said than done. My issue with alternative cues is that they often introduce a form of unintentional order or hierarchy. For example: When I want to plot two different variables and I want to avoid that one of them appears more important than the other I can do this nicely with color.
Other line attributes are not so easy. A solid line will always seem more important than a dashed or grey line and a dashed line more important than dotted one. Trying to change the dash and dot pattern so that they have similar grey values makes them hard to distinguish. I find color is the easiest way to distinguish things without introducing unintentional order.
I watched a youtube video where a color blind guy in his 50s was given a pair of EnChroma glasses for color blindness, put them on, and had a strong emotional reaction, like a deaf person hearing for the first time.
Then I read the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EnChroma) that says "they do not restore normal color vision, and claims in excess of this by the manufacturer have been characterized as marketing hype ... They are simply a very expensive pair of hunting glasses ... How could they possibly work? The answer is that they can't."
I liked the video and now my feed has dozens of similar ones with similar strong reactions. If they don't work why the reactions? Am I missing the videos where they just say "meh"? Is it a placebo effect or maybe they're just playing it up for the gift givers? I guess the test is whether they continue to wear the glasses for long.
You might want to spend a few more minutes on finding out what those actually do. Yes, of course they don't restore normal colour vision. They can't possibly work iff that's the goal.
Those already have a very high overlap. A lot of people with red-green colour blindness still have those two types of cones working quite well individually, but the overlap is even more extreme. What these glasses do is filter out photons that fall in these overlapping regions. This amplifies the difference in responses from different cone cells.
I don't know about what marketing claims were made by that particular company. Maybe some were plain wrong; maybe they were correct but overhyped with a tendency to mislead. Maybe some of those YT videos aren't as ‘organic’ as they seem, but dramatic reenactments incentivised by some PR douche handing out free samples. All I know is that it's not implausible that someone is happy because they can finally tell grey from purple for the first time. I'd encourage interested consumers to check out other brands first, but no idea if those even exist in the consumer eyewear market. Maybe Enchroma are sitting on a patent? Anyway, try before you buy.
By the way, I would have been surprised if that Wikipedia article actually said ‘they can't possibly work‘. That's not the case — it contains a quote with that claim. It's cool to shorten a quotation to just the relevant parts, but please try to not invent ‘alternative facts‘ in the process.
> like a deaf person hearing for the first time
Yeah, definitely not. Once upon a time, my headphones and earphones failed simultaneously and I spent a couple of weeks listening to podcasts through busted earbuds, in shit quality, mostly one ear at a time. Then I got proper IEMs and finally could hear music again. In stereo. Experience all the instruments. That felt quite good. I guess it's more like that. Except it would be for the first time ever. I can see how that would prompt an emotional response.
I tried contact lenses for colour blindness as a kid (No idea if they were made by EnChroma).
They made everything seem so much brighter and more colourful, like someone dialed the saturation notch right up.
I didn't like it. Everything was so colourful it felt like it was giving me a headache. I guess I could probably have gotten used to it if I'd kept with it, but I just didn't believe it would make me able to recognise colours correctly - I mean, surely my brain was already pretty much hard-wired to comprehend course a certain way? And I remember they were expensive, and our family wasn't exactly well off, so I declined.
Anyway, as a middle-aged man now, I don't feel like it's been significantly detrimental to my life. For the occasions I need it, I use apps to check the RGB values of things, and I can roughly figure out colours, but in general, yes, it's an impairment, but just doesn't feel like it's a big deal.
A former colleague of mine who was also red/green colourblind had a pair of these and I borrowed them for the weekend. I was pretty underwhelmed to be honest, couldn’t see much difference. Maybe they work better for certain types of colourblindness.
I'm yellow/blue blind in my dominant eye. This article rings true for me, although with different colour choices. For example, I didn't realize the halo thing was common, but I see it when looking at bright pink things.
The larger an object is, the more likely I can tell from that eye alone what colour it is. Mostly I err on the side of cyan - any colour near cyan (green to light blue) will invariably look like a single shade of cyan to that eye, so those colours are pretty much indistinguishable if overlapping like in the text examples. Eg: At night, the blue lights on buses and the green "go" light at intersections are the same colour to that eye - cyan. Until they get close (large) enough and then I can tell that they are different colours.
There is a huge difference when I do A/B comparison in either case, but when looking through both eyes simultaneously, I don't notice the deficiency at all. The brain decodes colour and fills in the blanks in unusual ways.
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.
This is a super interesting article! However some parts of it are... well they are true for me as well, even though I'm pretty sure I'm not colorblind.
This, in particular:
> Another consequence of all this is that I see very little color in the stars.
"Another consequence of all this is that I see very little color in the stars. That makes me sad."
WTF, Am I color blind too? I pass regular color blindness tests with ease, but I have never seen any color in the stars. Not with the naked eye at least.
With the naked eye, stars can be seen to have subtly-different colors. Other commenters have pointed out that Mars is rather distinctly orange/red, and easily visible in the skies of North America now.
One example between stars right now is the two brightest stars in the constellation Orion. Where I am, in Indiana, USA, Orion rises around midnight EDT (~0400 UTC) tonight. It will rise earlier is you are east of me, and will rise earlier as we get into northern-hemisphere winter.
Betelgeuse (pronounced like the movie "Beetlejuice", but with "bay" instead of "bee") is Orion's right shoulder. Since he is facing towards us, it is the star in the top-left of the constellation. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, so it is both distinctly bright and distinctly red when compared to the other stars in Orion.
The star I like to compare Betelgeuse to is Rigel, Orion's left knee (bottom-right from our point of view).Rigel is a blue supergiant, similarly bright to Betelgeuse.
Here's an excellent color-enhanced mosaic image of the constellation by Rogelio Bernal Andreo, which clearly shows the red-orange-ness of Betelgeuse compared to the other stars in the constellation:
To the naked eye, I (and other typically-sighted people) can distinguish these colors easily when looking for them. Their color ranges from red/orange to white to sort of sky-blue. This is because starlight is black-body radiation, which creates a very specific scale of colors. Here is an image showing the typical colors of stars, and their corresponding surface temperatures:
Rest assured that to me, at a glance, stars are just bright white dots. Even knowing that the colors are there, I still have to stop for a second and look at them in order to see it.
I have also red-green color blindness and it makes me really mad that a lot (like 90%) devices have a tiny LED that indicates if it is charged and the LED changes color from red to green when it is fully charged - I have to ask my kid or wife what color it is.
Please please, if you work in hardware, make it a red/blue or green/blue colors for empty/fully charged, or make it blink, anything, just not tiny 1 pixel size red or green color (or amber/yellow, they are equally hard to distinguish for people like me from green).
[+] [-] kabdib|5 years ago|reply
Wow. Okay then.
I hate multicolor LEDs with a passion. Those little amber or green dots look identical to me, even when you put them side by side. I use a phone app that uses the camera and shows me RGB values at a reticule. I've gone through rack and racks of equipment with that app, looking for things like dead drives and errored-out ports. Back in the 80s, I borrowed the eyes of cow-orkers (with the cow-orker still attached).
My wife was a PM on a project once, and asked what I thought of a bit of UI. The designers had replaced a set of small status icons with colored dots (green=ok, red=bad, puce=alerting, etc.). I explained that I could not distinguish them. They didn't believe me; it took that team about five months to come up with a UI that made sense (the same icons, but with colored, duh).
[+] [-] GordonS|5 years ago|reply
I've also noticed that it's much more difficult to differentiate tones and colours of small objects.
Cues were mentioned in the article, and I think I subconsciously rely on these a lot. For example, with traffic lights I know what the colours should be from top to bottom, and so I "see" them as the right colours - yet if you took photos showing only the colours in the abstract, I couldn't tell any difference between red and amber, and indeed I wouldn't be able to accurately tell you what colour any of them was.
Something people find interesting is that I often don't know what colour something is, but I'm often able to narrow it down to 2 or 3 choices - usually based on context and other cues, and also based on how I know I can misperceive colours. For example, I know I often see pink as grey, so if you showed me something pink, I might think it was "pink, or grey or green".
Another random anecdote that demonstrates the use of cues: years ago we had an old CRT TV, and every now and then it would suddenly display only in black and white. It really annoyed my wife, but I never even noticed - I guess in my head I "saw" someone's coat as red, for example. My mind just kind of filled in the blanks, like I suppose it must always do.
[+] [-] lb1lf|5 years ago|reply
This resulted in palettes for both deuteranopes and tritanopes; our support staff on occasion had calls from customers who had inadvertently activated one of the color schemes for the chromatographically challenged - they typically went along the lines of 'Did you nincompoops have some colorblind sod do your GUIs?'
-'Matter of fact, we did. Would you like me to put you through to him?'
[+] [-] jbay808|5 years ago|reply
The author (who I assume is male, I don't remember if he said so outright) kept repeating how colour is perceived based on the difference between receptor signals. I had learned that already so I kept thinking, "yeah yeah, I know"...
... Then he got to the point about edge detection, and suddenly I understood! I never thought before about how the difference is calculated between receptors that are not precisely co-located on the retina. Of course! Seems obvious in retrospect but I never thought about it. That also makes many colour-optical illusions make more sense.
If the author comes across these comments -- I have full colour vision and unusually good eyesight. Even for me, without magnification the stars are not colourful. Mars is slightly red, Betelgeuse is very slightly red, the milky way has a slightly bluish tinge, but for the most part, the stars are just white points. They do sometimes shimmer / twinkle briefly between different colours in a way that can make it really hard to say what exact colour they are, even if I stare at them. You probably notice that too, though. So I don't think your experience of the stars is likely to be that different, and you shouldn't feel sad!
[+] [-] RabbitmqGuy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antognini|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skrebbel|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] mcint|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericbarrett|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Zak|5 years ago|reply
Of course not constricting the pupils is a major reason people like dark mode, and mobile devices have greatly increased the use of screens in environments with low ambient light. I suspect the only good solution is to support both light and dark modes universally.
[+] [-] loeg|5 years ago|reply
* First, if you have the option of using one or the other, do so. Like, you can use red, blue, yellow, purple, and black for lines on a graph before you even need to find an additional color like green.
* Second, highly saturated ("computer" red/green) are easy to distinguish (for me, anyway, and it sounds like the author as well). So they're preferable to less saturated versions of red and green, if you need to use both.
For me, the most difficult reds and greens to distinguish are in the pastel range.
* Additionally, if you're designing UI for a program (game or whatever) with colorblindness options, PLEASE do not label the options with the medical names only ("deuteranopia", "protanopia", "tritanopia"). I don't know what the latin word for the medical condition of red-green colorblind is, I just know I have the relatively common kind of red-green colorblindness. I'd guess most people who aren't doctors are in a similar boat. Labels that include the color-distinction difficulty and relative commonality would be most useful to me, e.g., "red-green (MOST COMMON — deuteranopia)", "red-green (LESS COMMON — protanopia)", and "blue-yellow (EXTREMELY RARE — tritanopia)".
[+] [-] noneeeed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] II2II|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|5 years ago|reply
I don't see this advice getting much uptake.
First, green isn't a second thought for people with normal vision. It's a first thought. I can understand how this wouldn't be true if, to you, it didn't exist.
Second, the color space without green is harder to draw contrasts in than the color space with green.
Third, a friend of mine with red/green colorblindness always complained that he couldn't tell the difference between blue ("rare") and purple ("epic") items in World of Warcraft. (WoW has since solved this problem by throwing out the concept of item quality entirely, but the colors are still there anyway.)
So you're advising that people should make a quite unnatural choice, which will markedly reduce usability for almost everyone, but which won't actually solve the problem for the colorblind. It's just not a move that makes sense.
[+] [-] vanderZwan|5 years ago|reply
Aha! So that is why I have the hardest time with line charts even when I distinguish the colors in the legend just fine!
[+] [-] catern|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bump-ladel|5 years ago|reply
The idea is that the designer or developer can point their iPhone/iPad at design to get some idea of what it might be like for someone else to view it.
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/vision-impairment-simulator/id...
[+] [-] anikan_vader|5 years ago|reply
This is actually a slightly controversial claim. While r/g color-blind individuals do have difficulty viewing colors, they seem to have an easier time seeing through camouflage:
A study on the ability to distinguish tones of khaki:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/in-combat-stick-with-t...
There is strong anecdotal evidence that color-blind men specifically recruited during the world wars to see camouflage: (I have personally heard such an anecdote).
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a32spn/color...
And a short YouTube video on the ability of color-blind monkeys to forage for insects, whereas the monkeys with color-vision are better able to find ripe red fruit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NrmH039ffI
I suspect that if we lived in a world where the color-blind were the majority, it would be those with color-vision who wrote about their 'impairment'. Perhaps with a note about how video games often contain almost-impossible tasks to discern camouflage. (In the real world, video games often contain tasks that require the ability to discern colors that I find difficult due to my r/g colorblindness).
[+] [-] watwut|5 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, color blindness in overwhelmingly make issue.
[+] [-] garaetjjte|5 years ago|reply
https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2135713
Normal trichromats read Ishihara plates using their L- and M-cones. Red-green color vision defective observers rely on S-cone and luminance signals in reading the plates. Some normal trichromats can read the hidden digit plates because they can extract S-cone signal difference efficiently despite the distraction from L- and M-cones.
[+] [-] jjeaff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gravypod|5 years ago|reply
I've had some issues in the past specifically related to small red and green boxes. When you do some operations work you'll eventually run into a chart like this [0] and, during an outage, you'll undoubtedly not be able to notice a scattering of small red boxes in this type of visualization. Similar with line charts. Telling the difference between 2 lines on a graph that are not thick is difficult especially now that people have migrated to higher DPI displays.
[0] - http://status.ovh.com/vms/index_bhs1.html
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OscarCunningham|5 years ago|reply
This is frustrating. He's trying to correct misconceptions and then he immediately gets the word wrong. What he's describing is 'deuteranomaly'. The term 'deuteranopia' applies to the more severe form of colourblindness shown in his diagram (a); it's a form of true dichromacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Classification
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bluGill|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wglass|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teilo|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] emddudley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antognini|5 years ago|reply
Anyway, somehow my two friends started looking at color blindness tests. One of them had grown up in Latin America and hadn't seen a color blindness test before, so the other was explaining how there's a number in the center that you can't see if you're color blind. And he said... "what number?" That was how he learned at age 26 that he was color blind.
[+] [-] wglass|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mavidser|5 years ago|reply
Mars is very close and red these days, which I hadn't noticed before. I got quite giddy when I first saw a "colored dot" in the sky a few days ago and now most of my evening runs are motivated by getting a glimpse of the bright red planet. :)
A few weeks more until it starts rising early and isn't distinguishable anymore.
[+] [-] marcosdumay|5 years ago|reply
When the sky is dark, red stars are very distinctive, I don't think even color blind people would have a problem. (I am color blind, but I confuse blue and green, not red and green.)
Both yellow and blue stars emit blueish and yellowish light, and are much harder to tell apart.
As an added bonus, red stars are the first to disappear against a lit sky :(
[+] [-] grzm|5 years ago|reply
> "The color of a star, as determined by the most intense frequency of the visible light, depends on the temperature of the star's outer layers, including its photosphere."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star#Radiation
[+] [-] ideal_stingray|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endogui|5 years ago|reply
https://earthsky.org/?p=2875
[+] [-] weinzierl|5 years ago|reply
Because "keep them far apart" on the spectrum might not be helpful when taken litereally, here is a link to Lines of Confusion Diagrams im CIE 1932 color space.
https://www.color-blindness.com/2007/01/23/confusion-lines-o...
> "Second, use other cues if possible. Color is complex, so if you can add another component to a line on a graph, such as a dashed versus dotted pattern, or even good labeling, that helps a lot."
I find this easier said than done. My issue with alternative cues is that they often introduce a form of unintentional order or hierarchy. For example: When I want to plot two different variables and I want to avoid that one of them appears more important than the other I can do this nicely with color.
Other line attributes are not so easy. A solid line will always seem more important than a dashed or grey line and a dashed line more important than dotted one. Trying to change the dash and dot pattern so that they have similar grey values makes them hard to distinguish. I find color is the easiest way to distinguish things without introducing unintentional order.
[+] [-] hirundo|5 years ago|reply
Then I read the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EnChroma) that says "they do not restore normal color vision, and claims in excess of this by the manufacturer have been characterized as marketing hype ... They are simply a very expensive pair of hunting glasses ... How could they possibly work? The answer is that they can't."
I liked the video and now my feed has dozens of similar ones with similar strong reactions. If they don't work why the reactions? Am I missing the videos where they just say "meh"? Is it a placebo effect or maybe they're just playing it up for the gift givers? I guess the test is whether they continue to wear the glasses for long.
[+] [-] achenatx|5 years ago|reply
There are lots of reddish brown things that are actually red. I wear mine daily, but if I didnt, I wouldnt miss them.
With the glasses on I can see subtle red tints that I cant normally notice. For whatever reason it doesnt help much with green.
[+] [-] n3k5|5 years ago|reply
Look at the frequency responses of cone cells in a human with normal colour vision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision#/media/File:Cone-...
Those already have a very high overlap. A lot of people with red-green colour blindness still have those two types of cones working quite well individually, but the overlap is even more extreme. What these glasses do is filter out photons that fall in these overlapping regions. This amplifies the difference in responses from different cone cells.
I don't know about what marketing claims were made by that particular company. Maybe some were plain wrong; maybe they were correct but overhyped with a tendency to mislead. Maybe some of those YT videos aren't as ‘organic’ as they seem, but dramatic reenactments incentivised by some PR douche handing out free samples. All I know is that it's not implausible that someone is happy because they can finally tell grey from purple for the first time. I'd encourage interested consumers to check out other brands first, but no idea if those even exist in the consumer eyewear market. Maybe Enchroma are sitting on a patent? Anyway, try before you buy.
By the way, I would have been surprised if that Wikipedia article actually said ‘they can't possibly work‘. That's not the case — it contains a quote with that claim. It's cool to shorten a quotation to just the relevant parts, but please try to not invent ‘alternative facts‘ in the process.
> like a deaf person hearing for the first time
Yeah, definitely not. Once upon a time, my headphones and earphones failed simultaneously and I spent a couple of weeks listening to podcasts through busted earbuds, in shit quality, mostly one ear at a time. Then I got proper IEMs and finally could hear music again. In stereo. Experience all the instruments. That felt quite good. I guess it's more like that. Except it would be for the first time ever. I can see how that would prompt an emotional response.
[+] [-] GordonS|5 years ago|reply
They made everything seem so much brighter and more colourful, like someone dialed the saturation notch right up.
I didn't like it. Everything was so colourful it felt like it was giving me a headache. I guess I could probably have gotten used to it if I'd kept with it, but I just didn't believe it would make me able to recognise colours correctly - I mean, surely my brain was already pretty much hard-wired to comprehend course a certain way? And I remember they were expensive, and our family wasn't exactly well off, so I declined.
Anyway, as a middle-aged man now, I don't feel like it's been significantly detrimental to my life. For the occasions I need it, I use apps to check the RGB values of things, and I can roughly figure out colours, but in general, yes, it's an impairment, but just doesn't feel like it's a big deal.
[+] [-] tomduncalf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksaj|5 years ago|reply
The larger an object is, the more likely I can tell from that eye alone what colour it is. Mostly I err on the side of cyan - any colour near cyan (green to light blue) will invariably look like a single shade of cyan to that eye, so those colours are pretty much indistinguishable if overlapping like in the text examples. Eg: At night, the blue lights on buses and the green "go" light at intersections are the same colour to that eye - cyan. Until they get close (large) enough and then I can tell that they are different colours.
There is a huge difference when I do A/B comparison in either case, but when looking through both eyes simultaneously, I don't notice the deficiency at all. The brain decodes colour and fills in the blanks in unusual ways.
[+] [-] Wistar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aspyct|5 years ago|reply
This, in particular:
> Another consequence of all this is that I see very little color in the stars.
It's all white for me... Am I missing colors?
[+] [-] loxs|5 years ago|reply
WTF, Am I color blind too? I pass regular color blindness tests with ease, but I have never seen any color in the stars. Not with the naked eye at least.
[+] [-] avhon1|5 years ago|reply
One example between stars right now is the two brightest stars in the constellation Orion. Where I am, in Indiana, USA, Orion rises around midnight EDT (~0400 UTC) tonight. It will rise earlier is you are east of me, and will rise earlier as we get into northern-hemisphere winter.
Betelgeuse (pronounced like the movie "Beetlejuice", but with "bay" instead of "bee") is Orion's right shoulder. Since he is facing towards us, it is the star in the top-left of the constellation. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, so it is both distinctly bright and distinctly red when compared to the other stars in Orion.
The star I like to compare Betelgeuse to is Rigel, Orion's left knee (bottom-right from our point of view).Rigel is a blue supergiant, similarly bright to Betelgeuse.
Here's an excellent color-enhanced mosaic image of the constellation by Rogelio Bernal Andreo, which clearly shows the red-orange-ness of Betelgeuse compared to the other stars in the constellation:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Orion_He...
More information about the image can be found here:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap101023.html
To the naked eye, I (and other typically-sighted people) can distinguish these colors easily when looking for them. Their color ranges from red/orange to white to sort of sky-blue. This is because starlight is black-body radiation, which creates a very specific scale of colors. Here is an image showing the typical colors of stars, and their corresponding surface temperatures:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation#/media/Fi...
Rest assured that to me, at a glance, stars are just bright white dots. Even knowing that the colors are there, I still have to stop for a second and look at them in order to see it.
[+] [-] krzyk|5 years ago|reply
Please please, if you work in hardware, make it a red/blue or green/blue colors for empty/fully charged, or make it blink, anything, just not tiny 1 pixel size red or green color (or amber/yellow, they are equally hard to distinguish for people like me from green).
[+] [-] sergeykish|5 years ago|reply