Sami (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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accessibility_fail2009-06-19 12:55 am
sami) wrote in accessibility_fail2009-06-19 12:55 am
The devil's in the details
This is quite a minor incident in and of itself, but it's symptomatic of the wider problem.
Earlier this evening I was settling down to watch a DVD with my brother-out-law, Chas. Chas was operating the remotes, and was trying to get the DVD player turned on (shooting past an obstruction, you understand), when I heard him mutter that he wasn't even sure if the screen was on.
Looking over, I saw the red light on the corner of the (LCD) TV was showing, so I said it wasn't on. He switched remotes, hit the button again, the red light turned green and the screen started warming up.
"Okay, now it's on," I said. "You can tell by whether the light in the corner is red or green."
"Wait," Chas said. "They use red and green to indicate? Those bastards!"
Despite long and close association, it took me a second to work it out - he was having a problem because he has moderate red-green colour-blindness. Really quite moderate, but he could still only sort-of tell the difference after I'd pointed it out - he hadn't been aware, really, that the light changed colour at all.
Red-green colour-blindness is relatively prevalent in the male population; in cases like this it's trivial, but the sad thing is, marking distinctions by red vs green is not at all unusual. (Fairly recently, for example, Chas was looking at diagrams of something, and had to get my help, because the diagrams coded different areas by use of red and green dots, and he had trouble telling which was which.)
It's a thoroughly invisible disability, ranging from vague annoyance to occasional danger, but it shouldn't be a disability at all. Red/green should never, ever be used to convey information merely by colour differentials.
Earlier this evening I was settling down to watch a DVD with my brother-out-law, Chas. Chas was operating the remotes, and was trying to get the DVD player turned on (shooting past an obstruction, you understand), when I heard him mutter that he wasn't even sure if the screen was on.
Looking over, I saw the red light on the corner of the (LCD) TV was showing, so I said it wasn't on. He switched remotes, hit the button again, the red light turned green and the screen started warming up.
"Okay, now it's on," I said. "You can tell by whether the light in the corner is red or green."
"Wait," Chas said. "They use red and green to indicate? Those bastards!"
Despite long and close association, it took me a second to work it out - he was having a problem because he has moderate red-green colour-blindness. Really quite moderate, but he could still only sort-of tell the difference after I'd pointed it out - he hadn't been aware, really, that the light changed colour at all.
Red-green colour-blindness is relatively prevalent in the male population; in cases like this it's trivial, but the sad thing is, marking distinctions by red vs green is not at all unusual. (Fairly recently, for example, Chas was looking at diagrams of something, and had to get my help, because the diagrams coded different areas by use of red and green dots, and he had trouble telling which was which.)
It's a thoroughly invisible disability, ranging from vague annoyance to occasional danger, but it shouldn't be a disability at all. Red/green should never, ever be used to convey information merely by colour differentials.
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