If so, how do you (if you guys are around) handle the issue? I just heard a story today about a Japanese smoke alarm for deaf people that uses the smell of wasabe to wake them, so I got curious.
+5
A:
If you're really curious, look at
http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/2A.html
Very few colorblind people are monochromatic (totally colorblind). Most colorblindness falls into the category protanopia or deuteranopia, which can see yellows and blues and browns. So syntax coloring can get set to those. Most of them have a hard time seeing light green, which looks orange, etc.
Robusto
2010-03-31 21:30:47
Thanks for the link. I am genuinely curious, and do know that certainly very few people are "black/white" colorblind, but nevertheless I'm sure there are some that are programmers.
dclowd9901
2010-03-31 21:54:36
+5
A:
I am colorblind, red-green deficiencies (protanopes and deutanopes). I have never had any trouble with syntax highlighting, that I have noticed anyway. :)
Dustin Laine
2010-03-31 21:36:47
+1
A:
The consequence of colour blindness would be different for text on a screen rather than other situations.
That is, someone could tweak the UI to match colours as needed. The implicit meaning of the text is still there: comments are comment, keywords are still keywords etc.
It's not like having to decode a traffic light in a very short time, or being told to "cut the red wire" as a bomb disposal expert
gbn
2010-03-31 21:40:12
Actually, you can run into trouble there, too. Also in pie charts. My sons both have deuteranopia, and if you make one type of text light green and another type gold, they will look identical to them. Or to programmers.
Robusto
2010-03-31 21:55:02
@Robusto: but you can work from the text itself or with a colleague to work out differences.
gbn
2010-03-31 21:57:39
@gbn: True, the the point of syntax coloring is to make different classes of things easy to recognize at a glance.
Robusto
2010-03-31 23:44:44
+3
A:
Most syntax highlighting is configurable.
Certainly nobody should deliberately make life harder on colorblind people, but they've been managing to work around such issues for their whole lives. I've seen some cut and paste into non-color highlighting text editors. I've also seen that they tend to be more familiar with how to configure color highlighting that most people.
In vi, I use
:syn off
when someone discovers a truly horrid highlighting scheme.
If you want to get a feel for how color schemes might appear to the color blind, http://colorschemedesigner.com/ simulates several different colorblind models of perception.
Edwin Buck
2010-03-31 21:52:57
A:
Many editors allow you to set properties of the text other than color for syntax highlighting. You could change the weight of the font, underline, italicize, etc. Obviously you won't have nearly as many choices as with using color, but it would allow some differentiation.
shopsinc
2010-03-31 22:24:23
A:
I'm colorblind (only very mild) and I don't have any trouble at all with this. Generally the default colors in IDEs contrast enough that they are quite clearly different. The thing to remember that in most cases colorblindness is really a lack of sensitivity to color so bold high contract colors often be distinguished.
The biggest problem doing development having colorblindness is when I need to do some work with artwork and images - I just need to be extra careful that colors do actually match (I use photoshop or whatever to confirm).
anger
2010-04-13 00:21:30