Color Vision

Props for Contrast

Rob Palmer, of branded07, adds to the thesis that building in contrast is an easy way to address potential issues for color blind visitors of your websites. 

But how do you know if the pages you are designing have enough contrast?  Rob offers this tip:

If you aren’t sure if a page is contrasted enough, one good tip is to desaturate your website (save first) in Fireworks or Adobe Photoshop and see if the images still have an impact. Desaturating the image will remove all the color from the image and this way you will be able to tell if the image has enough contrast without color to be seen.

Link: branded07: Online Web Portfolio of Rob Palmer:· Are we all really that inaccessible?.

Is There a Railroad Surgeon in the House?

I have just stumbled across an obscure and wonderful book, thanks the to efforts of Google to digitize the world's printed material. It's the 1895 edition of Color-vision and Color-blindness: A Practical Manual for Railroad Surgeons by J. Ellis Jennings, MD.  The title alone evokes all kinds of thoughts. Who knew there were such things as railroad surgeons?  They must have been the precursor to flight surgeons.  And who knew that color-blindness was such a problem in the railroads that not just a manual was required on the market, but a practical manual (no esoteric manual for me, thank you very much).

Well, it seems that in the 1890s color-blindness was a big deal. Dr. Jennings informs us that

"In 1875 a serious railway accident occurred in Sweden, which intensely excited public attention. At the investigation which followed it was found that colorblindness was one of the principal causes of the disaster."

Horrors!

You'll enjoy Jenning's history of color-blindness, the evolution of detecting color-blindness among railroaders, and the descriptions of the color blind tests used at the time.  My favorite?  Here's a picture of Thomson's Stick. 

Yep, that's the official name of the test. It's a "stick."

Link: Color-vision and Color-blindness: A Practical Manual for Railroad Surgeons

 

Choosing a Proper Color Scheme

InternetLayout.com uploaded a nice post on selecting a proper color scheme when designing a website. They get a hat tip from me for this closing paragraph to the post:

Finally, it’s worth dropping in a note here about colour blindness. Try to make sure that your design uses colour to make itself aesthetically pleasing, but doesn’t rely on it for anything essential. You wouldn’t believe the statistics for the prevalence of colour blindness (some say as high as 10% are at least partially colour blind), and you need to consider these people too when you’re designing your site they’re at least as important as the people with unusual browsers, for example.

You might like to take a look at your site using www.vischeck.com, which will let you see things the way a colour blind user would. Make sure they can at least still read your text!

Link: Picking a Colour Scheme..

I Can Feel Red, Hear White, Taste Yellow

Joe Rutledge is thinking in color--for those that can't see any.

In reflecting on a passage in one of his textbooks that asserts it would be impossible to explain colors to someone who is colorblind, Joe succinctly buries that assertion in an eloquent tour of  touch, sound, smell and taste.  To wit, his take on the role touch could play in relating color:

I could relate colors like red and blue to feeling a burning fire or a freezing glass of water.  I could then continue to use the spectrum of heat to correlate to different intensities of light.  Green might resemble room temperature, or yellow could be set the warmth of the sun on a spring day.  You could also say that colors, like temperatures, can be mixed to get something in between.  Hot and cold mix in order to make a room temperature color.

Link: Color Analogies « Joe Rutledge’s Weblog.