I’ve been designing a couple of websites over the past two weeks – an activity that I find particularly challenging due to my colour-blindness.
Whenever I tell someone I’m colour-blind, it usually triggers a series of questions about what I’m able to see (sometimes including the classic “what colour is that grass?”). But it’s almost impossible to explain the experience accurately.
Rather than not being able to see certain colours at all, colour-blindness is more about not being able to see colours in certain contexts. The most obvious is not being able to see colours when they’re in close proximity to others (as in the well-known colour-blind test ‘blobs’). There are countless ways that this problem manifests itself in day-to-day life: picking the desired coloured-pencil out of a tub containing many colours, picking out subtle colours in a fabric and so on.
The problem seems to worsen when the areas of colour are very small, and are quite close to each other in terms of shade: it’s almost impossible, for example, for me to see red berries on a tree (or even a robin).
There are more bizarre problems when it comes to even large areas of colour. Although I can ’see’ every colour when it’s spread in a large area, I find it incredibly difficult to identify many of them without some frame of reference. The most bizarre of which is identifying grey as pink and vice versa. Unless certain shades of grey and pink are side by side, I can never be sure quite what the colour is. It’s the same with shades of green, brown and red. And I can never tell what colour dark suits are.
I really do envy everyone who can see the full spectrum of colour, as I suspect I’m living in quite a dull world in comparison. I can see rainbows, but can only see them change from shades of blue to shades of orange unless they’re particularly striking.
It’s also a good job that I’m not particularly devoted to on-line gaming. The mini-maps that are used to pinpoint the location of friends and foes usually employ red and green markers which are impossible to distinguish. I guess that’s why I like Pacman – at least I can easily tell who’s who!
And if you think that colour-blind people have no trouble on the roads, think again! Yes, I can see the traffic lights OK, but it was years and years before I was told that cat’s eyes are actually different colours depending on where they’re sited. Didn’t have a clue.
I use blue in most of my websites as it’s the most distinctive colour I can see, and I can be much more sure of picking it out correctly than I can most other colours. Most of my websites tend to feature very bold colours, and I’m guilty of picking some pretty awful combinations.
Still – why should I care? I can’t see a bloody thing!
