GUI design for color blindness

Question

It is common to represent status of an item in a GUI using the colors: red, yellow, green, to mean error, warning, and OK (or something equivalent). However, 7-10% of men have difficulty distinguishing between red and green because of color blindness.

So far I've looked at Color Scheme Designer which simulates how people with different color blindnesses would perceive a set of colors, but I'm interested in hearing how you have approached this problem and how successful it was.

Answer 1

Found an interesting piece on designing for color-blindness.

One of the task-aways is never to rely solely on color. Always have some other indicator (text, icons) for a particular task.

Answer 2

Don't depend on the colours. You could apply symbols too (e.g. green tick, yellow triangle, red hexagon) or use text labels.

Answer 3

Use 'common' symbolic icons as well as colour to represent statuses.

Might be useful: Where can one find free software icons / images?

Answer 4

Many UI designers start with black-and-white designs, and later add color to accent or emphasize, but only after the black-and-white design meets all the design goals.

Answer 5

Please forgive the necroposting, but if you absolutely must use color, I've found colorbrewer2.org very helpful - it has some nice pre-generated color palettes that they classify as "colorblind safe." Of course, as has been posted, avoid color when possible.

Answer 6

Get any book about "accessibility" and you should have plenty of suggestions. They will more or less boil down to a simple principle: do not bind any information to color solely. That is, color should just be accompanying the information, which should never be conveyed by color only. I used Linux to develop one such application, and I used Compiz filters to simulate color blindness: very handy. As a side note, there are more types of color blindness out there, so pay attention to that too.

Answer 7

The company I worked for hired a colour-blind Swing developer - me!

Answer 8

Don't employ colour-blind operatives. ( Apparently the discrimination laws in the non-EU country we were selling the software in allowed this; YMMV )