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Chasing rainbows
Apparently, the very idea of colorblindness is hard to visualize. Take
a shot at looking through my eyes.
By ANDY BAIO
Apr 7, 2023, 7:30 PM GMT+7
37 Comments / 37 New
Mengxin Li / The Verge

part of /

You, me, and UI

L
iving with colorblindness feels like you’re constantly
being pranked by the world in subtle, irritating ways.

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?

Oh, sorry — that’s what it looks like to me. You probably see it more like this.

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’m 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.
Airport parking garage at PDX. Move slider to the left to see what Andy Baio sees.

It took me a little longer, but I found a parking spot. Waiting at the gate, maybe
I’ll 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.
Move slider to the left to see what Andy Baio sees. u/iesvy on Reddit
u/MatthiasKK on Reddit
For some people, colorblindness is a serious liability that closes doors on career
dreams. It’s hard to become a pilot, train conductor, or pathologist if you can’t
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.

But for me, it’s just a lifelong series of unnecessarily confusing interactions,
demonstrating that the world wasn’t designed for people like me.

T
here 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’s hereditary, so figures will vary from region to region.)
My mom’s 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.

I’ve had a lot of conversations about my colorblindness with people who aren’t
colorblind. (Pro tip: when you meet a colorblind person, don’t repeatedly point to
things and ask what color they are.) It seems like the very idea of colorblindness
is hard for them to visualize. 

Despite what many think, I can see most colors! My world isn’t 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.) 

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.

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.

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.

Move slider to the left to see what Andy Baio sees. Image by PopSugar

Apparently, this is nauseating to people? That’s my life.

Because red and green are complementary colors opposite one another on the
color wheel, they’ve become the default colors for every designer who wants to
represent opposites: true and false, high and low, stop and go.

Inconveniently, these are also the two colors most likely to be mixed up by people
with color vision deficiencies.

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’t happen: the cultural meaning
is too ingrained.
I’
m constantly asked if I’ve tried EnChroma glasses, the
corrective glasses made famous in a series of viral videos in
which colorblind people try them on and spontaneously start
sobbing at the wonder of seeing grass for the first time.

Despite the hype, their corrective lenses don’t actually fix colorblindness. They
correct for it by increasing the contrast and saturation of colors, shifting the
color palette into something visible, but they can’t help you see colors you’re
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.

And for me, they’re not an option at all. EnChroma offers colorblind glasses with
prescription lenses, but my prescription is so strong I can’t use them.

Besides, why do colorblind people have to purchase expensive glasses in order to

function in the world when designers could make very minor changes that make
a huge difference for a whole lot of people? 

That’s the most frustrating thing about these accessibility issues — they’re very
much avoidable! 

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? 

At the very least, use a tool like ColorBrewer to find a colorblind-safe palette so
you don’t end up accidentally designing a map like this, which looks to me like
the American Midwest is in the middle of the Purge.
Move slider to the left to see what Andy Baio sees.

There’s 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 is the closest.) 

These simulators are useful tools, but to rely solely on them is a one-dimensional
approach to accessibility. If there’s 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.

T
he last time I wrote about my colorblindness was 12 years ago. The good
news is that things are getting better. More and more, I’m seeing apps
and games add colorblind modes or shift their palettes to be more
friendly to the colorblind.

When Among Us launched in 2018, it was incredibly difficult for the colorblind
to play. Every character model looks the same, distinguished only by color.
Players would use the colors to identify other players in the voice chat. “Green is
sus,” someone might say — but which one is green? 

“Green is sus,” someone might say — but which

one is green?
Plus, the game’s wiring tasks, in which players have to reconnect wires of the
same color to their corresponding terminals, required normal color vision to
finish. For me, it was just trial and error. I felt excluded from the moment I
started playing.

It took years of complaints before the developers added symbols to the colored
wires in late 2020. An update in June 2022 finally offered the option to display
color names on characters.
Left: Normal Vision Right: Protanomaly
Image: /u/PieCreeper on Reddit

Contrast that with Wordle, the viral sensation created by Josh Wardle as a love
letter to his partner, which launched in 2021. The game shipped with a colorblind
mode on day one. The default colors are very hard for me to see, but the
colorblind support made it immediately accessible.
Move slider to the left to see Wordle’s built-in colorblind mode.

I asked Wardle what inspired him to add the feature. “I think it felt like a simple
thing to do to make more people feel included,” he replied, but he quickly
acknowledged he could have done more. “That said, Wordle did have a bunch of
issues accessibility-wise that I was ignorant of, which I regret.” (Wordle may have
shipped with a colorblind mode, but it was unusable for blind players, and people
sharing their Wordle results inundated those using screen readers with useless
colored emoji names.)

Accessibility in design is a form of empathy: trying to reach beyond your own

personal perspective to try to understand other people who, in this case, very
literally don’t see the world the same way you do.

Fitting enough, designing for accessibility isn’t black and white, a single feature
you choose to build or not, but a vast and colorful spectrum as diverse as the
people you’re designing for.

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