Are you living with color vision deficiency?

sivda damodaran
UX Spring
Published in
4 min readMay 13, 2021
Colors of Life

The world looks dissimilar through color-blind eyes. Many individuals aren’t even mindful that they have vision deficiency until they start to compare how they see and understand color with someone else.

The most common way to test the eye condition is the Ishihara Color Test, where small colored dots depicting an image or number is hidden in a large, differently dotted circle. In the trial, color vision deficiency people face many complications distinguishing between all colored dots; meanwhile, normal-sighted people make out the numbers effortlessly.

Color Vision Test

Most color vision deficiencies are genetic. These deficiencies occur when the sensory parts at the back of the retina pick up the wrong color, and in extremely sporadic cases, the sensory receptors aren’t there to report.

Do they only see in black and white?

Monochromacy

The word color blindness is often misinterpreted. There is a false supposition that a color blind person can only see in black and white. That condition does exist called monochromacy, which is extremely rare. The principal indication that color blind people experience is color confusion where someone wrongly identifies the shades of color, most commonly reds and greens and less commonly, blues and yellows.

Strongly color-blind persons might only state about 15 hues apart from each other, while normal color vision can identify more than 100 different hues. Color confusion can be obvious in many everyday tasks, resulting in annoying outcomes such as choosing a car, preparing food, interpreting color-coded information in graphs and map, the color-blind person finds themselves in misfortune.

Each of us grasps colors differently

Unambiguous colors

Humans aren’t unambiguous in terms of color; we don’t segment the same color vision involvement. The human retina has photoreceptors, rods and three special cells called cones, and each cone is accountable for one part of the color spectrum: red, green, and blue. Cones respond to light and advance information about its nature to the brain. Your blue can be slightly bluer than someone else’s. When one type of cones breakdowns, the color this cone would normally absorb is different. The three types of cones elucidate into three main types of color blindness: Deuteran for green, Protan for red, and Tritan for blue. There are no working red cone cells in people with protanopia, which means that they cannot see red and the constituent color.

Creating a website for everyone

For every 100 users that visit your website or app, up to 8 people could experience the content much differently than you’d expect. Websites aren’t just meant to look good. They must be legible and easy to navigate for all users. Otherwise, your website will upset a lot of users, and a business will lose potential clients. If your site is well designed, it should already be accessible to all users. These simple rules are easy to follow and will greatly benefit everyone out there.

Color filters with label

One cannot rely on only colors to convey the message. The color-blindness condition makes it difficult to perceive common red error messages. Adding a text label beside each color can be beneficial for people, and also it will take out the guesswork from it.

Minimalist design

Minimalism is about including only the most essential elements. The busy users should not be forced to figure things out? Their eye must directly be drawn to the text and action button. You need to rely on sharp images and the right typography to convey your message.

Avoidable color combination

Over time we’ve come to realize that it’s better to add some subtle color. Some colors are frigid and irritating, the user interface elements and text remains unsettling to the eyes. It is necessary to control the colors to design our website. The listed color combinations can be avoided to make the website eye-friendly.

green/red

blue/purple

green/blue

light green/yellow

Color-blind friendly graphs

friendly graphs

Improving your graph can help make users more accessible, which doesn’t mean expelling color from your charts and graphs. Using patterns and placing text within each segment makes graphs easy to understand. Using a key in a segmented pie chart will serve in places where the text doesn’t fit.

Conclusion

Enhancing your website for people affected by color blindness is significant for both accessibility and inclusivity.

Here is some carryout:

· Avoiding awkward color combinations

· Using icons to complement warnings and alerts

· Adopting minimalistic

· Using different patterns to call out important information

Compounding all these basics will help make your designs more accessible to color vision deficient people. So, which elements do you focus on when designing for color blindness?

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sivda damodaran
UX Spring

Sivda was born in Gods own country and raised in the city of lakes, in the heart of India. She has been a full-time information developer by profession.