Designers and web developers please take note!
Posted on 09. Oct, 2008 by Ken Davidson in Comment
Various forms of colour-blindness exist. One of the most common is red-green colour blindness, and, depending on where you get your figures, this affects around 7% of males. (Women are afflicted in very small numbers due to having to have defects in both X chromosomes.)
That’s a large part of the viewing audience, so have a care when slapping pastel-shaded text around, especially in areas of low contrast. Actually, that’s good advice for legibility across the board – not just for colour-blind people.
So, given that colour-blindness is not that rare (you probably know someone who has this problem), why is it overlooked so casually? I don’t know, but I’m colour-blind, and a visit to blogcrowds.com had me in a tizz recently. Before you can leave comments you have to circumvent an antispam mechanism. You know, the things that usually ask you to type in some scrambled text. Except I was presented with this…
Pick all the green ones? Crikey, I’m guessing that some are yellow or mustardy, but without grabbing the image and reading the RGBs in Photoshop I’m stumped.
Because they’re isolated by white space in the above example I would be tempted to select h, q, f, k, j, f, c, x, m, r and q! I know some are different, but to my eye they could all be green!
I tried four times, and failed. I noted the line at the bottom about contacting admin for help. You know what? I couldn’t be bothered.
Then I thought again. No, I would contact admin for help: I sent them an email, as advised. Over 2 weeks later and I’m still awaiting a reply. Several million minus points there I think ;)
Your average colour-blind chap isn’t so afflicted that he regularly goes through red lights. It doesn’t work like that, it’s all about context. I rarely find it a problem, and if I’m unsure I ask someone to help me.
However, deliberately designing an antispam mechanism that actually goes out of its way to slip up a large portion of the audience is absolute lunacy.
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