For those people out there designing user interfaces, web frontends or anything else displayed on a screen: About 8% of all males are color blind. This could mean that because of a simple color choice, 8% of your target audience (customers) could have serious difficulty in using your design. 5% of all males can’t distinguish green from red, although they are regarded as high contrast to eachother.
Do you want to test how your design looks to colorblind people? Now you can, with Color Oracle, a tool for Mac OSX and Windows which transposes the colors of your screen to reflect what it would look like if you were color blind. In fact, it can simulate 3 different kinds of color blindness.
From the site: “Color Oracle takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see. Color Oracle applies a full screen color filter to art you are designing – independently of the software that you are using. Eight percent of all males are affected by color vision impairement – make sure that your graphical work is readable by the widest possible audience.”
