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Serious question, a red/green test strip at my eye doctor in Tulsa saved my whole dashboard design
I was getting my yearly eye check in Tulsa back in March, and the tech handed me one of those color plate books while I waited. I asked her what she was looking for and she said "just making sure you can tell red from green, some folks can't and they don't find out for years." That stuck with me because I had just shipped a dashboard that used red and green dots for status, so I went home and ran my colors through a contrast checker and the green dot failed hard against the gray card. Swapped to a blue and orange pair with a little icon next to each, and the plain text contrast jumped way up too. Anyone else get a color check done somewhere random and then go audit their own work because of it?
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parker16822h ago
Kind of disagree that the eye doctor thing is the lesson here. The real takeaway is that a green dot ever passed review in the first place. Red and green status lights are like the oldest trap in the book, and the contrast checker caught it, not the eye test. Most tools ship with a built in check now, so running one takes five minutes. The eye exam was a lucky nudge, but the fix was always sitting there waiting for somebody to look.
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