We are heavily reliant on colour to convey messages in our society. Everything from the adverts we see on Instagram, to the products we buy in our local supermarket, to the applications we use to navigate around a new city. But imagine not knowing what the colour red looks like? Imagine not being aware of the emotions that colour is used to evoke? Imagine trying to use Google Maps to navigate around your city but not being able to distinguish between the different rail lines because everything is a shade of brown?
For roughly 1.1 million Australians, it’s a daily battle according to Visioneyeinstitute. Things many people take for granted such as traffic lights are ambiguous in their meaning. How can you decide if you’re supposed to stop or go when all three colours look the same? For those living with colour blindness, there is no cure. It’s a genetic mutation from birth, meaning the individual is lacking or missing colour receptors in the cone cells in their retina. Depending on what colour receptor is missing or damaged (be it red, green, blue or all of them) will affect what colour palette you see the world in.
Figure 1 - Types of colour-blindness dependant on missing colour receptors
As there is not yet a technical solution to curing colour blindness, we, as content producers must make small changes to provide a cultural change to make our product or application useable to everyone.
Does your content do its job?
As Location Intelligence Consultants, our applications and maps need to communicate their message quickly and effectively in order to be useful to the client or audience. However, if the content we’re producing is unseeable to approximately eight percent of males and 0.4 percent of female Australians then that product is insufficient. This inefficiency may have untold consequences on the target audience both physically and financially. So how can we design content that is useable to everyone?
Figure 2 - Example of effective and ineffective colour palettes1
Simple solutions for a complex problem
Where do you begin? What tools do you have at your disposal? Well, there are a number of paid and free colour blind emulation tools which allow people who aren’t colour-blind to view content through each of the different types of colour blindness. This is a good start for assessing how effective or ineffective your application, map or design is. One such emulation tool is ColorOracle, a small and simple tool designed by the Monash University which allows users to change the colour palette on their screen according to colour palette(s) viewed by millions of colour-blind people.
But how do you know what colours will work best and ensure content remains visually appealing? There are a number of tools available to help you select the most effective and appealing colour palette for everyone.
Adobe Kuler gives the user an interactive platform to test and explore different colour combinations for complementary, compound, triad, monochromatic palettes and many others.
ColorBrewer is designed for mapping purposes but can easily be applied to a wide range of applications. ColorBrewer provides a selection of preformatted colour-blind safe palettes for sequential, diverging or qualitative datasets/types. Colorbrewer is powerful because it allows you to mix and match different colours and instantly see the combination in a simple web map and with satellite imagery underlaid.
When you have a lot of content to display, you may start running out of colours to use. Hatching and textures are also good methods of conveying information to everyone. Transport for London (TFL) used a combination of colours and textures to create colour-blind friendly maps of London’s underground tube network.
TFL went a step further and built colour blind friendly viewing options in their mobile application. This provided the 17 million tourists visiting London annually with a robust platform to navigate London’s transport network with ease, regardless of how they see the world.
Figure 3 - Combining effective colour choice and texture design to maximise content effectiveness
Incremental change leads to significant outcomes
To increase colour blindness accessibility, minor design changes can make a considerable difference. Having an understanding of colour-blind vision spectra and using tools like ColorOracle, Adobe Kuler and ColorBrewer permit designers to utilise a range of different colour palettes and hues to present information to the widest audience possible to maximum effectiveness.
With more state and federal government departments requesting colour-blind friendly content, we as designers need to be thinking innovatively and creatively in how we might deliver the best application or content to suit our client and audience’s various needs.
Reference
Author
Ben Jones is a Location Intelligence Consultant at GHD Digital in Perth, Western Australia. Working across industry and government projects, Ben brings his experience in data structure, governance and spatial/data analytics to provide benefits to any team or organisation.
This article was first published in Position Magazine, December 2019/January 2020 issue. www.spatialsource.com.au