PSA: I keep seeing charts where the only difference between lines is color.

I was looking at a sales report at work yesterday, and the line chart had four trends on it. They were only told apart by being red, green, blue, and orange. For me, with my red-green colorblindness, two of them looked identical. I had to ask my coworker which line was which, which was pretty awkward. It matters because charts are supposed to give you information fast, not make you ask for help. I know this is a common issue because I see it in presentations and online dashboards all the time. The fix is so simple: use different line styles like solid, dashed, and dotted along with the colors. Has anyone else run into this specific problem with line charts at their job?

3 comments

3 Comments

webb.stella1mo ago

My district's data dashboard does this with five lines. I always have to print it in black and white just to guess which trend is which, which defeats the whole purpose. It's a basic accessibility fix that gets ignored way too often.

garcia.miles1mo ago

Ugh, that sounds incredibly frustrating and all too common.

theamason1mo ago

Read an article last year that called this exact thing a "chart fail." It pointed out that color-only differences exclude a huge part of the audience, not just people with colorblindness. The writer said using patterns or shapes is a basic design rule, like adding captions to a video. It's wild how often this gets missed in professional tools that people pay a lot of money for. Makes the whole report feel like an afterthought.