Chrometric: Designing for the Color-Blind
Over the past few months, we’ve looked at how designers are addressing the vision-impaired – from low-cost eyeglasses to Braille-inspired obejcts for the blind to an innovative diagnostic test using a cheap cell phone. Today, we look at a design approach to a vision problem often perceived as much less severe but no less disruptive: Color-blindness.
Chrometric is a new browser that lets you experience the web as a color-blind person does. It offers eight filters that address the different types of color-blindness, including blurred vision and loss of contrast. This is a particularly useful tools for web designers, allowing them to reconsider one of the most potent currencies of interface design – color – and the radically different experience it offers to color-blind users.
Color-blindness affects between 7 and 10% of males. (And, interestingly, less than 1% of females.) As color cues continue to dominate the web’s navigation and information ecosystem – from Wikipedia’s blue links in black text to the red/green indicators on Dow Jones – Chrometric offers a useful toolkit for designing more inclusive user experiences.
Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine and Huffington Post, and spends a shameful amount of time on Twitter.
