Hi! I'm a drawing of Catherine. She does most of the writing here, including this blurb. (Does this count as writing in the third person?) Catherine believes that websites don't really run on technology, they run on emotions. If you agree, then she wants to help you rock it out and be awesome online.
photo credit: antwerpenR
Nearly one in twenty people have some form of colour blindness. To see what your website looks like to them, go to the Vischeck webpage checker and enter your website’s address. You can display your website for two kinds of red/green impairment and also blue/yellow.
While you’re there, I recommend you look at the examples. Someone very dear to me is red/green colourblind, and it was really useful to see what colours look like for him.
Is your website readable through someone else’s eyes? Tell us in the comments!
Thanks for raising this important issue. As one who isn't colorblind, I've lived my life largely oblivious to this issue. I had no idea how many people are affected. That ended last year when I learned that one of the guys I work with is colorblind. One of our technical writers spent time researching the colors we could safely use in our product documentation. You probably already have these links but we found this site very informative: http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/ and the documents on this page very useful: http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/#pdf.
Hmm, I know a couple of people who are colourblind, but it never occurred to me to check that my website would display for them. The colours are a bit mank on the red/green one, but at least most of the content is visible. The blue/yellow one would almost work as a theme though.
I've put the simulations below in case anyone wants to look at them.
Green/Red http://vischeck.homeip.net/uploads/126535069128445
Yellow/Blue http://vischeck.homeip.net/uploads/126535076029039
Interesting – I checked my website(s) and made sure that at least the copy was visible. Great resource!
Great links, Mike. Thanks!
I live with an extremely colourblind guy, and I now use him as an informal litmus test. I've had way too many designs over the years that he'd squint at and say, “Where's the link?” that I've gotten quite good at safe colours and combinations.
It's almost impossible to design something that everyone find pretty even BEFORE you take issues like colour-blindness into account, but as long as it's readable for everyone that's a good start.
You could ask your colour-blind friends what they think of the colour scheme… because they see it differently, they sometimes have a fascinating new insight into the colours and layout. I had to change a design once because my partner pointed out that if you can't see the colour differences, the whole page looks pretty much the same. There was no other visual hierarchy.
Lots of people think accessibility is hard. Nope!
Nope. It sure isn't.