I'm friends with a lot of visual artists and designers and a subset of them clearly have color vision beyond the ordinary. That is something to be aware of as a designer, that even non-colorblind people may not be able to detect some of the subtle differences you can (especially if you have a nicer/better calibrated monitor).
So I made a tool that tells me the name of the closest web color to whatever is under the mouse pointer. It's not perfect, but it's certainly easier than trying to discern RGB values.
I'm proud that I've turned my prototype into a polished product, available in 5 languages on the Mac App Store and with a nifty shortcut for copying colors to the clipboard. Check out the link in my bio, if you're interested. I know I'll probably get some downvotes, but I'm excited to share this with others who may find it useful.
Honestly I should just make a browser plugin which universally removes the colours you can't see and switches them with someone we can see.
https://sujansundareswaran.com/blog/why-hsl-is-better-than-h...
When people find out I'm colorblind they love to ask me the never ending stream of "What color is X?" questions, which are fun but superficial. I think the bigger difference between myself and people with normal color vision is how often I fail use color as a piece of information.
On the other hand visual texture means a ton to me. When it comes to clothes I could care less about the color but can absolutely be swayed by the look of the fabric.
I'm also in the same boat as to "what should we do about it". At least it's something that's easy to explain to people and well known. I always wonder if there are not lots of people going around that perceive things in very different ways than other people, and have no way of knowing if it's just us. You can test colorblindness with the plates, but what if all food tastes off to you, how do you test that? Or if human voices tend to sound like screenching?
Your point about colors vs shape is also interesting. I wonder if the fact that I'm colorblind plays into my preferences of terminals, text and keyboard shortcut.
It's harder than it sounds. If you have total color blindness, your mapping between colors and values might be entirely different from most people, or even other people with monochromacy.
Color blindness in general is a pretty wide range of perception abilities. There's a classification but it's fairly rough. It's usually close to impossible to design something that makes sense for all colorblind people at the same time, because the types overlap heavily.
> User: My hands don't work very well, I can't drive
> Designer: What if we made the steering wheel larger?
Which is to say that for myself and many like me, 'colorblind modes' frankly suck.
Sure, a bigger steering wheel helps a bit (now you can try to move it with your feet..) but what'd be a hell of a lot nicer is avoiding a hands-only design in the first place.
My brain isn't wired to look at colors and register that as /a unique thing/, I regularly enjoy 'surprises' when I realize _oh my god they meant that color to mean something_. My brain registers /contrasts/ as unique things, not colors.
Strip your design of all color and ask yourself if it is joyful to use. If it's not, it's poor for many colorblind users too. macOS gives me red/yellow/green buttons to interact with windows, wtf are those? But if you give me symbols like `x`, `-` and `[ ]`? Now I know what we're talking about.
Make your design work without color, and then add pleasant colors for those who enjoy it.
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Opposite to that I'll say I realize I'm in a minority of minorities here; I don't expect anyone to do anything special for me. I just find a lot of humor in the seemingly endless revelations of 'you can see things the way colorblind people do' via image filters. Reminds me of the 'gifting my uncle colorblind glasses' videos that go viral every week.