A former coworker of mine developed this chart which has an inset for web designers to help them understand how to avoid color combinations which would make things confusing for some color-blind people.
I understand that there are different factors of color-blindness, but for you do you see the colors of the inset colorblindness reference chart (kind of lower left of the big chart, in the linked image) to be much the same hues as the large overall chart?
-AmbushBug
For me, I can’t tell the difference between green and red in isolation. If they have a field of greens and reds, I can tell the difference, sort of, but if you point me at one, it’s all red to me. Though I’m okay with traffic lights, unless they’re that new kind that’s kind of uniformly bright.
Same for brown and green or blue and purple. Yellow highlighter on white paper is physically painful to look at.
A friend of mine finished a degree in Electrical Enigneeing and failed a medical for his first job because he was red/green colou-blind. He’d never noticed before and was devistated.
Now, nearly ten years later, hes trying to finish another degree at night.
Oh, and as far as buying clothes… I wonder if men dress so plainly because of color-blindness. I find I get one color pants and a range of shirts that go with. White and chambray goes with kahki. Actually, pretty much everything goes with kahki. Brown shoes.
Pretty much anything goes with blue jeans, too.
Fancier? Black suit, monocolor shirt, and a tie with some sort of pattern on it.
I’m a (mildly) colorblind graphic designer, so I may have some additional insight into the issue of color accesibilty in websites. There’s already been a load of good info, so I’ll try not to repeat too much. . .
It’s already been mentioned that text should contrast from the background for best readability. For people with normal color vision, the color of the text itself (hue contrast) helps, but this isn’t always the case for color blind people. My colorblindness is fairly slight, but since I’m very aware of the issue, I tend to test things very thoroughly. A very easy test that I conduct is to convert things into a grayscale image and check the readability in that form. I use Adobe Photoshop to do this at work, but most graphics software will have the ability. I just paste a screen capture into my graphics program and then convert to grayscale. If I can no longer read the text easily, then I know changes need to be made.
There is also a good online resource for checking color accesibility at www.vischeck.com . There are good examples of picture that have been altered to illustrate what colorblind people see as well as some good text info. In addition, they have a utility that will alter an image you upload or a webpage to simulate colorblindness. The coolest thing (to me) is that they even have a Photoshop-compatible plug-in the you can download. I believe this plug-in will also work in Paint Shop Pro and in Photoshop Elements. You can run any image through the filter and have it generate a simulation of how it will look to someone with any of the three main types of colorblindness.
WhetherMan and Jimmy Chitwood: I know that the color I am seeing isn’t the same as others are seeing because those people tell me. When I’m by myself, say, and am looking at a cover of a book, I don’t worry whether the color I’m seeing really is orange. But when someone says, “Hand me that red book, eh?” and I mistakenly give them the wrong book, that’s when I find out that I lost the color game again.
And after that happens time and time again with the same color(s), ya’ pretty much learn which are your weaknesses. Never, for instance, ask me to separate the ripe bananas from the underripe ones.
Slight aside: WhetherMan, is your name a Phantom Tollbooth reference?
AmbushBug: The section that I think you wanted me to look at is so small and the colors so bunched together that I’m at a loss for even hazarding a guess concerning most of them. Mostly they blend together and instead of looking like separate cells of color, a lot of them look like they bleed into each other. And really, other than more colors bleeding together, the smaller chart looks like a miniture version of the larger one. Does that make sense?
E-Sabbath: Those overly-bright traffic lights are the worst for me! Those were the ones they had in Nebraska City! I mean, yes, usually I can tell the difference between the red and green (not so much with the yellow, and other than position) because the red, of course, is much darker. But with the brighter traffic lights like you mentioned, that brightness difference is all but gone, leaving me questioning whether I should stop, gun it, slow down or drive on the friggin’ sidewalk.
I choose the sidewalk because you get more points for hitting the unsuspecting, walker-using old lady.
SkipMagic, I’ve just now gotten a chance to jump back on the boards and do thank you for your reply; that certainly helps to clarify a bit. Would you have been offended by the question had you not said to throw everything out there? Somehow the “my colors” versus “your colors” is something I had always wanted to stay away from since it has a sense of …I don’t know…“mine” is better than “yours” type of thing.
And in answer to your side-note…“it’s more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be.”
Nah, WhetherMan, when it comes to me being color-blind, pretty much all questions are fair game with or without qualifications. Had you come up to me on the street and asked the same questions, it wouldn’t have bothered me at all.
My color-blindness isn’t a hardship. Confusing at times, yes; humorous most of the time, defnitely; but nothing like real disabilities. At least not in my life.
I mean, hey, I’d rather be confised on colors than to not be able to see anything at all.
You know, we also have a Canby and an Official Which on this board, too. In fact, my signature (which I almost never use) is this:
Yeah I think so. You see, the deal is (I should have explained better) that all the little squares on the big chart are different colors, and the small representation of the big chart is supposed to be “how some color-blind people would see the colors in the big chart”. So by asking how similar in appearance the big vs. little charts were to you, I was validating the chart for anyone who might want to buy one from my former cow-orker 
[sub]no, i don’t get kickbacks and my motive was not to advertise for the site. just a joke[/sub]
Another two questions:
Is there a “society for the colorblind” or somesuch?
Do you know many other colorblind people - anyone with the “protean” type (sees only purple as a hue)?
-AmbushBug
I too am color-blind, red-green as far as I know. It’s usually not a burden, and I’m not quite sure where I’d place myself on the severity scale; probably moderate. I’m fine with colors in isolation, except for shades of blue and purple (sometimes I can tell it’s purple, sometimes I can’t) and really bright green that looks yellow. Green traffic lights look white to me, or white with a greenish tinge. The vast majority of the time, though, I can identify colors without any impediments.
As far as clothes go, I’ve only got like one shirt with really strong coloring. It’s really, really, really bright orange.
Does your world look like a 1950s TV show?
Can’t you do it by smell and feel?
My serious question is, does this make it difficult to play PS2 games?
I decided this thread wouldn’t be complete without a colorblind woman… so here I am! TA-DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
I’m “green deficient”, but only a little bit. I see red just fine, and some shades of green are definitly GREEN, but many other shades of green look yellow, blue, or gray to me.
For instance, there’s that dark green color they’re using on cars and SUV’s these days. Last year when I met someone off the Internet (actually, from this site) at a certain location he told me to look for a “green Ford Exploder”. He had no way of knowing that, to me, his SUV was not green at all but dark grey. Colors described as “teal” and “turquoise” all look blue to me. Light greens may look yellow to me. I have a coat I’m told is green but it looks light brown to me (let’s call it “khaki”, how about it?).
I found out I was colorblind when I took my vision test for my pilot’s license. Wow, was I surprised! I had earned an art degree and never knew!
Street lights are not usually a problem. Some do appear more blue than green to me, but since I can distinguish them from the reds and yellows easily it’s a non-issue. Green lights at night can get “lost” in white background lights, but, again, the yellows and reds jump out so I know when to slow down and stop. They recently installed some new traffic lights near me and as I was driving out there one day I said "WOW! Those lights are really green and my husband looked at me weird and said “Uh, yeah…” - but, you see, to me those lights were much more green than traffic lights usually are to me.
About the only other annoyance is that the air navigation charts for my area are bluish (to me at least) and when my flight instructor used a yellow highlighter to mark a course the resulting “green” disappeared into blue again - it was invisible to me. So I went out an bought an orange highlighter. End of problem.
When clothes shopping I either stick to “safe” colors or bring the husband along (his color vision is normal).
As for that website chart - At first glance I thought the little chart was the same as the big chart, but when I really looked at it I realized the little chart was “washed out”. I have, once or twice, had problems with websites - usually those using a lot of pastals or colors of similar contrast. But since my color vision is only slightly off it’s not a huge issue for me.
Oh, forgot one annoying thing - but it has nothing to do with what I see.
There are lots of folks who absolutely believe that women can’t be colorblind. So I have been accused of faking, seeking attention, and being a transsexual. The first two are irritating, the latter amusing.
My mother and grandmother are colorblind.
I first noticed I was colorblind when my mother would walk me to school and she would tell me to “go” on the green light. Well, the green light didn’t look like green, it looked white.
Even today, the green light looks like a regular white light.
First question, and I pray this isn’t something stupid I’m missing, what the hell is “buff”?
Second question, how can someone be “slightly” colorblind? I admit to knowing nothing about the boilogy involved, but I assumed that either your red perceiving rods (or are those cones?) work or they don’t. What makes one person “slightly” red/green color blind versus someone who’s “completely” red/green color blind? Where does the former have ability that the latter doesn’t exactly? Is it seeing shades of the same color, or resolution of objects or what?
I actually went out and researched this when I was diagnosed.
There are several forms of colorblindness. Some occur when a particular type of cone is non-functional, and when that happens the person does not perceive that color at all. So a person with that form of red/green color blindness will not see green at all - these are the people who look at a green traffic light and say it looks like a white light. That sort is usually a sex-linked trait on the X chromosome, meaning it is far more common in men than women (although there are a very small percentage of women who get a double-whammy of defective X and have the problem). However, achromatopsia (which I probably misspelled), a condition where none of the cones work leaving a person with monochromatic vision and extreme sensitivity to bright light, is not sex-linked and occurs equally often in males and females. It’s a lot rarer than the sex-linked varieties.
There are also forms of colorblindness where a particular cone still reacts to a color, but not normally. This may have a fancy name like deuteranmalous trichromacy, which is an ornate way of saying “the green sensor is a tad out of whack”. Thus, they still perceive green when the color is what is called “saturated”, meaning very strongly green. So the cones are there, and either they’re not operating quite as well as they should, or maybe some are working and some are not. These are the folks who look at a green traffic light and say “blue”.
Women who are colorblind are more likely to be of the “partial” sort than men are. Which has led to some folks theorizing the following: You see, you really need only one working X chromosome in a cell. In men, they only have the one, so that’s the one that’s working. In women, each cell has two, so the body shuts one down. Which one is chosen at random in any given cell. So it may be that the “slightly” colorblind women are carriers of the trait on one X chromosome where by random chance, enough of the X’s in eye cells with the defect are operating (instead of the non-defective) that only a protion of the green cones are operating. So… maybe 50% are operating instead of 100% Or maybe 75%, or 30%. The result being the woman can see really really obvious greens but in pastels or in “blue-greens”, “yellow-greens” and “greenish-browns” there’s not enough green to trigger their cones, resulting in a person who can perceive green but for whom various shades of green will be “off” from what the majority of the population perceives.
But since there some men who fall into the “slightly colorblind” category, there’s probably a distinct gene that codes for slightly defective cones as well.
And it isn’t always red/green that’s affected, there are other colors that can be affected. Like blue/yellow.
So the whole matter is a little more complicated than my high school biology textbook led me to believe.
shep proudfoot: No, my world doesn’t look like a 1950s’ television show; however if I don’t stop the cats from running over auntie em’s head and butt whenever she spends the night, she’s warned me that we’ll live like a 1950s’ television couple.
Separate beds. 
(It might be worth it, though, if for one evening I get to see her cook dinner in a dress and pearls. :p)
j.c.: You know, I’ve been dealt a couple of body parts that don’t fully function (stop that!); my nose ain’t a hundred percent, either. So when it comes to the smell (stink) of bananas, (and spoiled milk, dead skunk, stink bugs and dog poop, etc…) I can’t smell 'em. Of course, I suspect that my lack of canine-quality nosing abouts is really a result of year 'round allergies. (Not that I’m complaining–I mean, who wants to invite dog poop into his life?)
Broomstick: Yay! You know, as soon as I saw your name in this thread, I was hoping you’d let us know how being color-blind affected your flying. It doesn’t seem like it’s been a problem at all. As far as you know, is there a level of color-blindness that would keep a person from getting his/her pilot’s license? Could, for example, those people who are completely color-blind get a license?
I’ve met only one female who was color-blind, but that was years ago and in high school. It doesn’t show up that often, as you inferred, but let me say that I’m happy that good ol’ Ma Nature afflicts her little girls, too. 
Omniscient: The first time I encountered buff as a color was when I was working at OfficeMax in their copy center and saw Xerox’s pastel “buff” as a color paper option. Like I said, it looks like ivory to me, but maybe someone else may be able to describe it better. Go to
this page and you’ll see some buff-colored items at the beginning.
I’m not totally sure about the biology involved myself, either. Initially they tell the layperson that there are only a few types of color-blindness (red/green, blue/yellow, etc…), but like almost all things biological, I’m sure there are more degrees involved than mentioned. I do know that when I volunteer that I am either slightly or partly color-blind, I’m just saying that I’m not totally color-blind and can see most colors.
Or, what Broomstick just went out and researched. See? You just need to ask an intelligent color-blind person.