what it looks like to be red green color blind
How your colorblind and colorweak readers see your colors
Function one of a 3-part series on colorblindness
When visualizing data, you ever employ colors. And nosotros at Datawrapper take written about color a lot. Merely if you don't know any colorblind people, it'due south easy to forget that your charts take readers who can't tell colors apart as well as you do. Should you lot worry about them?
That'due south not an easy question. How many of your readers are colorblind differs between regions, ages, sexes, and the kind of deficiency. For example, we know that red-/light-green deficiencies are far more mutual in men than women and that they're more mutual for people with European descent than for Asians[i]. 8% of European men and 0.5% of European women seem to accept some kind of blood-red-/green colorweakness or colorblindness.
So if you have a designer blog or a website that's simply read past women, don't worry too much. For everyone else, I wrote this three-part serial almost colorblindness. Here's what the parts will embrace:
one How your colorblind and colorweak readers see your colors
That's the article you're currently reading! This week, y'all'll learn about:
The basics
1. Colorweakness
2. Colorblindness
Color combinations to avert
1. Red, dark-green and dark-brown
2. Pink, turquoise and grey
three. Majestic and blueish
ii What to consider when visualizing data for colorblind readers
The 2d part explains color combinations that work, colorblind-safe palettes, and other considerations. They all make information technology more likely that colorblind readers can read your charts – and that readers with normal vision tin can decipher them faster (win-win!).
3 What's it like to be colorblind
In the third commodity, you'll hear from then colorblind information visualization enthusiasts themselves, like our Datawrapper CEO David. You'll larn if/how they perceive their colorblindness as an inconvenience in daily life and when reading (or designing!) charts and maps.
Allow'southward start with the nuts:
The nuts
The best caption of why we see colors I found is this fun 5min video by Calder Hansen:
Every bit the video explains, we run across color because photoreceptor cells (also called cones) in our eyes react to certain light waves. We have three types of these cells: They're either especially sensitive to light waves that interpret into cherry-red-ish, into green-ish, or into blue-ish. If i of these cell types is not working properly, you're at to the lowest degree a bit colorweak. If it doesn't work at all, you're colorblind.
So there are different kinds of colorblindness and three different kinds of colorweakness, i for each kind of cone type.
(At that place is likewise Achromatopsia, which is colorblindness in its literal sense: You tin can't come across whatsoever colors at all. None of your cones all the same piece of work, just your sense for lightness remains. It'south extremely rare, so I won't mention it in this commodity.)
Colorweakness
Permit's see what the world looks like for your colorweak readers. Go on in mind that the lines are blurred betwixt normal vision and a color vision deficiency. Your colorweak readers might see these colors better or worse:
The colors wait like there's a retro Instagram filter put on top of them – only it's still possible to distinguish between them. Red and green, blue, and yellowish await unlike from each other. Colorweakness is far more common than colorblindness; around 6-7% of males[2] have some kind of colorweakness.
The names of these types of colorweakness audio complicated, simply they're merely the Greek words for outset, second and third and the word for anomaly. And then Protanomaly ways "first anomaly", Deuteranomaly ways "2d anomaly" and Tritanomaly "tertiary anomaly". The social club of colors is the same as in RGB: red, green, blueish. And so the get-go anomaly, Protanomaly, is a red-weakness.
Colorblindness
Let's motion on to colorblindness. Colorblind people accept one defect cone type: They're either red-bullheaded, green-blind, or blueish-bullheaded. People with good vision come across ten million colors. Colorblind people come across less.
Colorblindnesses are named like colorweaknesses, except with the ending anopia. a- means "no/not" and -opia ways "vision", so anopia means "no vision":
Yes, this is worse. The bad news is that colorblind people can't distinguish at all between certain colors: Your reddish-blind and green-blind readers can't tell red and greenish apart, or orange and light green. For your bluish-blind readers, blue and green looks the aforementioned.
The adept news is that colorblindness is uncommon; at least less common than colorweakness. Around 2-three% of men are colorblind.
Colour combinations to avoid
Every twelfth men and every 200th woman of Northern European descent has some kind of red/green color deficiency. They're either colorweak or colorblind. If 500 people see your visualization, 24 of them might take problems to read information technology because of it. So here's what to avert.
(Red-blindness and light-green-incomprehension are so similar that I cover them together. I go out out explanations for the very rare blueish-blindness.)
Blood-red, green and chocolate-brown
Blood-red- and green-bullheaded person have problems to distinguish betwixt ruby-red, dark-green and dark-brown, if their effulgence is the same. Note that saturation doesn't play a role. ⬤ is far more saturated than ⬤, but they both appear as ⬤/⬤ to cerise- and green-blind people.
Likewise note that red doesn't indicate "danger, attending!!" for blood-red- and light-green-blind readers, as it does for readers with normal vision:
You can see this in the photograph above. The crimson traffic light doesn't stand out from the green trees in the background.
Pink, turquoise and grayness
You can also meet on the photo to a higher place that the lite greenish ⬤ of the traffic light looks similar a light pinkish ⬤. But the grey of green-bullheaded people also has a pink-ish tint to it, so ⬤, ⬤ and ⬤ all look like shades of greyness to greenish-blind people.
The same is truthful for darker colors: ⬤ and ⬤ become ⬤ for red-blind people. Note that elements with these colors won't get the attention of colorblind people when they stand in front of grey gridlines.
The "grayness" of colors depends if y'all're red-blind or dark-green-bullheaded; then brand sure to check for both types of colorblindness.
Imperial and blue
For carmine- and green-bullheaded people, a red purple looks similar bluish. For example:
- For red-blind people, ⬤ and ⬤ both announced as ⬤
- For greenish-blind people, ⬤ and ⬤ both appear equally ⬤
This also applies to lighter or darker imperial colors. Your red-bullheaded readers will see a blue, no matter if yous nowadays them the colour combination ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ or ⬤ ⬤ ⬤.
That'southward it for this week! If there's something I should mention in this article or something I got incorrect, delight allow me know at lisa@datawrapper.de or in the comments below. Click here to read the next article in the serial and to learn which colors piece of work well and which tricks exist to enable colorblind people to read your data visualizations.
-
The metastudy by Jennifer Birch in 2011, "Worldwide prevalence of red-dark-green color deficiency", "confirms that the male prevalence of deficiency in European Caucasians is about 8% and that the prevalence in Asian populations is between 4% and five%." ↩︎
-
I couldn't discover consistent numbers for the different kinds of deficiencies (fifty-fifty this Wikipedia chapter contradicts itself), so don't rely too much on the numbers I land in this article. ↩︎
Source: https://blog.datawrapper.de/colorblindness-part1/
0 Response to "what it looks like to be red green color blind"
Post a Comment