Just realized my brand colors fail for about 8% of men

I was tweaking a landing page last night and randomly decided to check my palette against color blindness simulators. Turns out my carefully chosen green and red combo looks identical to about 1 in 12 guys with red-green deficiency. Found this stat on a WCAG accessibility checker site that broke it down by population. Now I'm rethinking every palette I've used in the last 3 years. How do you test your colors without relying on a simulator that might be wrong?

2 comments

2 Comments

taylor_barnes595d ago

Hold up though, I get what you're saying but color blindness simulators are actually pretty solid these days. I've tested one against some actual color blind friends and it matched up scary close to what they described seeing. The real issue is that WCAG guidelines are so strict they make you think your design is failing when it might still be usable for most people. Like that green and red combo, yeah some guys won't see the difference, but if you add icons or text labels nobody is actually stuck. Slap a little underline on those red links or put a pattern in your graphs and you're probably fine without starting from scratch.

simon_chen5d ago

My buddy Jake redesigned a whole dashboard for his startup using red and green status indicators. A colorblind coworker mentioned it looked exactly the same to him, so Jake had to go back and add yellow warning triangles next to everything. That was the last time he skipped running a simulator before launch.