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PSA: Red-green contrasts are useless for about 8% of men | Colorblind Friendly Design - The Design Community Hub

PSA: Red-green contrasts are useless for about 8% of men

I was at a UX meetup in Austin last month and this guy from a medical software company gave a talk. He said something that stuck with me: 'If your interface relies on red and green to communicate status, you are literally invisible to some of your users.' That hit home because I had been using red and green indicators on a dashboard for months. I went back and swapped them for red and blue plus a text label like 'Active' and 'Inactive'. Has anyone else found a good color pair that works for both accessibility and aesthetics?

3 comments

3 Comments

amy_reed794mo ago

Wait, isn't it wild how one little change can fix so many problems at once? My buddy runs a small IT shop and he had this whole system where green meant everything was fine and red meant something was broken. He showed it off at a barbecue last summer, and this guy who works with him just said "uh, I can't tell the difference." My friend was stunned, he had no clue. He spent the next weekend redoing everything with blue for good and orange for bad, plus little check marks and X symbols. Now he says it actually looks cleaner and he catches errors faster himself because the icons pop more than the colors ever did.

schmidt.blake5mo ago

Gotta admit I used to be one of those people who thought "well just use red and green everyone knows what those mean." Then I tried showing a dashboard to a friend who's colorblind and he couldn't tell which items were flagged at all. That was a real wake up call. Swapped everything to use blue and orange with icons instead and it actually looked better in my opinion. The text labels thing you mentioned is key too because even without color issues someone might be looking at a screen in direct sunlight or something.

betty_fisher55mo ago

Honestly, that's a really good point about the sunlight thing too. Never even crossed my mind until you mentioned it, but yeah, glare can totally wash out colors. Glad you found something that works better though, that's a solid fix.