Colour blindness research put into practice

This post concludes my research into colour blindness and the internet.  What an eye-opening (no pun intended!) journey it has been.  I have learnt about the importance of designing websites with accessibility in mind, the fact that it is illegal to not do this (which I did not know!) and the importance (and size) of this group of web users.  

I think as designers we get so caught up in the design and the client’s needs and wants that we forget about the end user and the fact that 1 in 10 web users has some form of disability.

I have designed a website with my target group in mind and have put it to the test with the colour blind web page filter.

You can view it here.

What is color blindness?

In my research on color blindness and the internet, I’ve been amazed as to the information and resources available on this subject.  Did you know that as a web designer, 1 in 12 visitors to your website are color blind?  Depending on your traffic of course, this could add up to thousands of visitors.  There are three main types of color blindness, each type is then broken down into subtypes which refers to sensitivity to a particular color or specific color section on the color spectrum.

The most common type of color blindness is Anomalous Trichromat Vision.  When designing for this group, it is important to avoid red and green color combinations as this group will not be able to tell these colors apart.  The same things goes for combinations with variations of red and green – which includes purple and orange.

Other key recommendations are the use of high contrasting color combinations like black and white, and the use of large clear fonts.

New blog theme to suit colour blind readers

Whilst doing my research on colour blindness and the internet, I realised that the WordPress theme I initially chose was all wrong! It contained orange and green text – a nightmare for some colour blind users.  Therefore I have updated my theme to be more black and white which is one of the recommendations I came across at All Web Design Blog, a great blog resource that highlights some good basic key points to remember when designing websites for the colour blind.