Be Kind to the Color Blind

As a red-green color blind person myself I can only cheer on articles like this and wish more people would pay consider color blind in their designs.<p>Off the top of my head, some UI's that suck due to my color blindness:<p>- MS Word 97 (haven't used anything beyond that) underlines misspelled words and grammar mistakes with two different colors that look the same to me.<p>- Civilization 2 has those villages that blend right into the background for me. I quickly gave up on the game after looking forward to it for a very long time.<p>- My digicam battery charger has an LED that's red when charging and green when the battery is fully charged. Um thanks . . . why not just have two separate (labeled) LEDs or just have one LED that's turned on/off?<p>- Settlers of Catan's board. Darn lumber and bricks look pretty darn similar to a color blind person which makes it difficult to quickly skim through the board and make analyses for your next moves.<p>- Traffic Lights - Why not use shapes also? In some areas (Castro Street in Mountain View comes to mind) the green lights are very close in color to the street lights themselves. I have to concentrate really hard when driving on Castro at night. Also I don't know WTH additional reading article "What about Traffic Lights?" is talking about. I rely very heavily on the order of lights which makes driving at night difficult because you can't tell if the light is on the top, middle, or bottom.<p>- Sushi Restaurants with the conveyer belt where you take dishes off the conveyer belt and you're charged based on the plate color/pattern. I once went to eat at such a Japanese restaurant with three other color blind people and one non-color blind person. We were constantly asking the non-color blind person how much each plate was as it passed by, as a result usually miss it, and have to wait for it to loop back around (assuming it was still there).<p>Oh and when you find out someone is color blind please don't randomly point to nearby objects and ask "what color is that?" If you want to know what it's like see <a href="http://www.vischeck.com/examples/" rel="nofollow">http://www.vischeck.com/examples/</a>

I used to ignore articles like this... "I'm not color blind so why should I care?" But, I've found that considering color blind users helps me design interfaces that have better contrast and are more quickly scannable, which ends up being better for all my users.

Here's a nifty color blindness simulator for OS X: <a href="http://michelf.com/projects/sim-daltonism/" rel="nofollow">http://michelf.com/projects/sim-daltonism/</a>

BTW simply converting a design to B&#38;W will expose most of its usability problems related to contrast (just saying it in case it's not evident).

Was recently discussing with a friend who is color blind. He pointed me to this site which gives good examples (normal vs color blind):<p><a href="http://critiquewall.com/2007/12/10/blindness" rel="nofollow">http://critiquewall.com/2007/12/10/blindness</a>

How difficult/practical would it be to create a software filter that replaces these colors at the user's screen with other, more easily discernible?

Color blindness is an aberration in God's eyes. It's a sin, and you are not born that way, you choose it. The internet is His punishment for your wicked ways.<p>Color-blindness is threatening the institution of sight!