Color Blindness

Hi guys! :)

How are you today? Hope you are having a good day so far! :)

Today I have another post, which I was not planning before. It is the same situation as my last blog post to be honest. I was planning to talk about something completely different, but one of the comments we got, changed my mind. So without any further delay, let's get into this blog post.

As you probably guessed from the title and the picture, I want to speak today about a color blindness. I choose this topic because of one of the comments we got on our idea. This comment was from CJ, who asked us what will happen/what we will do if someone who will use the app will be colorblind. And let me tell you, that was freaking good question. The whole idea is based on colours and how to simplify the process as much as possible, so people with any type of disability can use it. The only problem with this concept is that we have never stopped and thought about the possibility of people suffering color blindness. So after reading this comment, I decided to look up more information about color blindness and try to find a solution for our mistake.

Firstly, let me give you some facts, I found out while researching everything about colour blindness. From the name of this disability, you already know that people suffering from this, have a problem to distinguish between colours. The official definition of color blindness is that it is "the inability to see colour, or perceive colour differences, under normal lighting conditions." Of course there are different types of colour blindness. These are just some of the examples of what colours they see and how many people suffers from these disabilities:

So how people with this disability see? This is the colour spectrum people can see when suffering Protanopia alias Red-Green Color Blindness:

What is interesting and probably quite shocking thought is that a significant percentage of the population suffers from this disability. More precisely, it affects 8% of males and approximately 1 in 200 females in the world. Overall the number of people suffering with this disability is around 40% of the population. You can see the graph below:

Lastly, I wanted to look up and find out what is the current situation when it comes for this disability and finding job/being employed. The situation is very similar to any other disability. The level of possibility to be employed when suffering this disability depends on the severity of the condition and the type of job. Many jobs require the ability to distinguish all colors (e.g. drivers, pilots, doctors or hairdressers/make-up artists) and there is very small chance of getting this job, but it is not impossible. But on the other hand, there are jobs, where color blindness is not problem at all.

Based on these statistics, you can see that this is quite a big problem and a big drawback for our idea. So this made me think, how can we improve it?

1. not using red, orange, yellow and green as they are the most problematic color

• not using any of these colors for the tables recognition

• changing the color scheme for the levels of readiness of orders

1. use blue, white and black

• easier to identify and distinguish

1. use a small range of colors and associate the colors with particular tasks/message

2. use other types of visual effects (e.g. letters or symbols)

Ok, that's all for this blog post. As you can see there is still a lot more to think about and there are many more areas which could be improved. But we will work on them one by one, until the app will be as accurate and perfect as possible. I want to thank to CJ one more time for the comment and giving me the opportunity to improve the idea.

As usual, I hope you liked what you read. What do you think about this topic? Did the numbers of people suffering from color blindness, surprised you as much as it did surprise me? Or did you already know that? Do you have any other idea how to improve our app? Let us know in the comment section! :) Thanks for reading this blog! :)

Talk to you later,

Iva