The devil's in the details

[sami]

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.

Comments

[helens78]

I'm reminded of a friend of mine whose husband is red-green colorblind. We know each other through World of Warcraft, which for a very long time was awful about red and green being used to differentiate important game details.

Almost five years after game release, Blizzard finally added some accessibility options for colorblind gamers. I haven't tried them out, since I'm not red-green colorblind, but I'm glad they finally got around to doing it.

[willow]

That's so ridiculously simple and easy and horridly wrong. Red and green for off and on are everywhere. I remember when I got my new computer I was pretty glad and surprised the power button turned on blue. (Just a colour preference for me though).

Dang, though. That's seriously not giving a damn/paying attention to a goodly portion of the consumer base.

[watersword]

Thanks for this; you've got me checking my website designs currently being worked on to make sure I haven't done this, and I'm adding to the checklist I run through before launching anything.

[azurelunatic]

Even traffic lights have the lights in different places.

[haunted]

I have this problem a lot, with red/green lights especially. Both my router and digital TV box have LEDs which change from red to green when active, so I can't tell, for example, if my router is properly connected to my phone line without turning on the computer. It wouldn't be so bad if the lights were in different places, but as it is I needed someone sitting with me when I set them up.

A while ago I was linked to this comparison of board/card games for normally-sighted and colour blind people. The images are a bit confusing for me, being red-green colour blind, but I'm told it's an interesting resource for other people.

A personal anecdote: I had an acquaintance who thought I literally couldn't see red or green, and thought Christmas must be a really hard time for year for me, with all the decorations being invisible.