Living with colorblindness feels like you\u2019re constantly being pranked by the world in subtle, irritating ways.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The other day, I was booking a flight on Kayak, trying to figure out which dates are the cheapest by looking at their low fare calendar. See any issues?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Oh, sorry \u2014 that\u2019s what it looks like to me. You probably see it more like this.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I opened up Chrome Dev Tools, changed the cheap fare colors to something I could actually see, and eventually booked my flight. A few weeks later, I\u2019m off to the airport. Conveniently, the parking structure added colored lights to help find empty parking spots. Or so they say? They all look the same to me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
It took me a little longer, but I found a parking spot. Waiting at the gate, maybe I\u2019ll kill some time on my phone. But why is this photo of an ordinary chili pepper at the top of Reddit? Or this leaf? Oh, right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For some people, colorblindness is a serious liability that closes doors on career dreams. It\u2019s hard to become a pilot, train conductor, or pathologist if you can\u2019t differentiate colors in critical instruments, signals, or tissue samples. For others, it seriously impacts their day-to-day ability to do their jobs, like surveyors spotting flags, doctors looking at skin conditions, or electricians looking for colored wires.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But for me, it\u2019s just a lifelong series of unnecessarily confusing interactions, demonstrating that the world wasn\u2019t designed for people like me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are an estimated 350 million colorblind people in the world. About 8 percent of men, roughly 1 in 12, have some form of color vision deficiency. (It\u2019s hereditary, so figures will vary from region to region.) My mom\u2019s color vision is even worse than mine, which is very unusual: only about 0.5 percent of women globally are colorblind, about 1 in 200.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019ve had a lot of conversations about my colorblindness with people who aren\u2019t colorblind. (Pro tip: when you meet a colorblind person, don\u2019t repeatedly point to things and ask what color they are.) It seems like the very idea of colorblindness is hard for them to visualize.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Despite what many think, I can see most colors! My world isn\u2019t a black-and-white movie. Achromatopsia, or total colorblindness, is much more rare, affecting about 1 in 30,000 people. (Unless you were born on the Pingelap atoll in the South Pacific, where 10 percent of the population have inherited the gene<\/a>.)\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ninety-nine percent of colorblind people, like me, have a form of red-green colorblindness. I was born with the most common type, deuteranopia, a genetic mutation that affects the ability of the green-sensitive cones in my eyes to absorb light.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As a result, some hues of green and red look like each other, converging on a muddy brown. Other colors, like shades of purple and blue, bright orange and green, or even pink and gray, can look very similar. People with other kinds of colorblindness will confuse different colors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For example, at a glance, barring other context clues like texture and toppings, avocado toast and peanut butter toast look pretty much the same to me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Apparently, this is nauseating to people? That\u2019s my life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Because red and green are complementary colors opposite one another on the color wheel, they\u2019ve become the default colors for every designer who wants to represent opposites: true and false, high and low, stop and go.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Inconveniently, these are also the two colors most likely to be mixed up by people with color vision deficiencies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I wish every designer in the world understood this and would switch to, say, red and blue for opposing colors. But I know that won\u2019t happen: the cultural meaning is too ingrained.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m constantly asked if I\u2019ve tried EnChroma glasses, the corrective glasses made famous in a series of viral videos<\/a> in which colorblind people try them on and spontaneously start sobbing at the wonder of seeing grass for the first time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Despite the hype, their corrective lenses don\u2019t actually fix<\/em> colorblindness. They correct<\/em> for it by increasing the contrast and saturation of colors, shifting the color palette into something visible, but they can\u2019t help you see colors you\u2019re physically incapable of seeing. As a result, the reviews are wildly uneven, with some people loving them but many people reporting they do little but darken or tint their vision.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And for me, they\u2019re not an option at all. EnChroma offers colorblind glasses with prescription lenses, but my prescription is so strong I can\u2019t use them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Besides, why do colorblind people have to purchase expensive glasses in order to function in the world<\/em> when designers could make very minor changes that make a huge difference for a whole lot of people?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s the most frustrating thing about these accessibility issues \u2014\u00a0they\u2019re very much avoidable!\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In design, both in the digital and physical worlds, color should never be the sole indicator of meaning. A simple test: if your work was converted to grayscale, would it still be usable?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At the very least, use a tool like ColorBrewer to find a colorblind-safe palette so you don\u2019t end up accidentally designing a map like this<\/a>, which looks to me like the American Midwest is in the middle of the Purge.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s no shortage of colorblindness simulators out there, both free and commercial. They even come built into Google Chrome, Photoshop, Illustrator, and so on. But in my experience, none of them represent my vision exactly. (DaltonLens<\/a> is the closest.)\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n These simulators are useful tools, but to rely solely on them is a one-dimensional approach to accessibility. If there\u2019s any uncertainty, adding labels, icons, or textures to each meaningful color of your design will make it accessible to many more people, regardless of their ability to perceive color.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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