Another great tool if you are on a Mac is sim daltonism. I have had formal training in accessible web design and I will add that a red/blue color blindness is very very very uncommon. For the mediawiki.ui color palette we specifically chosen colors that are relatively colorblind safe, for common types of colorblindness.
We could shift the link colors to be identical to the mediawiki.ui colors (still red and blue, just different hues and shades) but the strongest rational would be consistency not accessibility as the pair of colors isn't usually a major issue.
https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/
On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 8:58 AM, quiddity pandiculation@gmail.com wrote:
Re: color blindness - To check specific color uses, try these 2 tools http://colorfilter.wickline.org/ e.g. http://colorfilter.wickline.org/?a=1;r=;l=9;j=1;u=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help... (and then click the options inside the floating navbox) http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/ (upload an image, and then simulate it in 8 types of color blindness) Tangentially, I compiled a link-dump of all the pages that document or discuss color blindness, at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Accessibility#Colour-blindness_links_and... Re: an "accessibility pane" - I had a similar thought (and learned about some larger internet projects such as GPII that seek to explore the same), and put some notes at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment/Redesign_user_prefe... I'll try to find some spare time to whip together a wireframe, later on if nobody beats me to it. :) On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 5:58 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman < d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, this is difficult to draw many conclusions from when not knowing exactly what kind of colorblindness, but.. As far as I know, if you really can't tell the difference between those blues and reds, then you have a rather rare form of colorblindness of either monochramacy or Dichromacy http://www.colour-blindness.com/general/prevalence/
However, there is a lot of details there. For instance, were some of the links visited ? They have a different shade, and that might well influence their distinguishability. Also with several of these colorblindness forms it might also be difficult to distinguish blue OR red links from the black text (in that case he might have interpreted and communicated his problem incorrectly)
You can try yourself with something like this palette comparator: http://www.iamcal.com/toys/colors/
In general when you have two colors like these, they should have differences in contrast, that almost always works even for colorblind people. Over all, there are limits to what you can do however. Changing the contrast might be disadvantageous for users with 'full sight' for instance. You can't 'defensively' code against all types of disabilities in the world, it would give you a very ugly website.
A few times, I have considered adding an "accessibility" pane or a link to a special page, that would allow you to set different skins, font size, underlined links and other readability aspects of the code. Such a pane could include settings for color filters for the different types of color blindness that apply to the entire window (much like your Operating System can have screen filters for this in it's accessibility pane). I've never had the time to actually build it though.
DJ
On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 1:55 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Hi,
Disclaimer: Though I worked in an accessibility software company for
three
years, I know almost nothing about color blindness, so this question may
be
silly.
A participant in a recent workshop for new Wikipedia editors workshop in Israel complained that he cannot tell red links from blue links because
he
is color-blind.
Has this issue ever been noticed or addressed by anybody?
The only related thing I can think of is the option to show links to nonexistent pages with a question mark, which was disabled on Wikimedia sites a year or two ago. Is there anything else?
Thanks.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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