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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