Color Universal Design (CUD): How to Make Figures and Presentations That are Friendly to Colorblind People

There are always colorblind people among the audience and readers. There should be more than ten colorblinds in a room with 250 people (50% male and 50% female). There is a good chance that the paper you submit may go to colorblind reviewers. Supposing that your paper will be reviewed by three white males (which is not unlikely considering the current population in science), the probability that at least one of them is colorblind is whopping 22%!

Okabe, Masataka and Kei Ito. University of Tokyo (2002). Articles>Accessibility>Graphic Design>Color

Effective Alt Text

It is perfectly possible to diligently apply alt text to every image on a site and create a result that is completely useless. Unless the alt text effectively conveys the information the image displays, it will be ineffective.

Frontend Infocentre (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Graphic Design

Be Kind to the Color Blind 

Using color and color alone as a visual cue is appealing because it’s usually an aesthetically pleasing and a minimalist design technique. Calls to action and visual cues are critical to interface designers because users, especially on the web, have limited patience and are looking to process information and make decisions quickly. Since the brain recognizes and forms an emotional bond with colors almost immediately, colors are a natural choice for visual cues. Unfortunately, it’s easy to alienate or confuse some of your users when some of those aesthetically pleasing colors look very similar. To point out a few interfaces that use hard to differentiate colors as visual cues, here are a few examples that have given me some trouble.

Campbell, Chris. Particletree (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Accessibility>Color