It Sucks Being Color Blind
I have partial color-blindness and it’s a huge pain in the ass.
I don’t really mind not being able to see or differentiate every color and shade out there; but it does really bother me that I have no idea what is going on when I’m looking at color-coded visualizations. Most of the models or visualizations that I view on a daily basis require more than a glance to figure out what is really going on.
The only notable exceptions are a select group of interactive visualizations. Newsmap is a great example because I can see the contrast of the colors and I can also filter results by category (see the screenshot below).
This has really started to piss me off over the past couple of weeks. I’ve been taking some time to learn about how to do surf forecasting as part of my quest to finally learn how to surf. Although a lot of sites exist to do swell prediction, nothing beats looking at the models and understand the information behind the predictions. The problem is that the models that can help predict swell information are simply useless for me. Take the example below…
With this WAM model, I can see the contrast in the colors on the map. The problem is that I have no idea which colors match the colors in the key. Is that a 5, 7, 9, 12, 15, or 18 ft. wave height off of the coast of Northern Africa? I simply have no idea. I can see the colors, I just can’t follow the shades over the distance between the map area and the key.
So, the next time your designing your application or your generating graphs or models, try and keep the people like me in mind and have an alternative way to see the information that you’re trying to present. In my case, it would save me countless hours finding out ways to hack around this type of oversight with my standard arsenal of color-picking tools.