Long ago I did some UI design for the military, the only job I've ever done where I had to account for colorblindness. The main thing was just never to use color alone to indicate anything. It's OK to have color enhance the distinction between elements, just not to be the only distinction. What worked best was just to design the UI in monochrome and then add color to make things pop. I've found it to be a great principle to carry forward since it improves usability for those with or without full color vision, in all kinds of lighting scenarios.

(I realize this doesn't really answer the question, which is an interesting one. Just suggesting it may be solving the wrong problem.)

Nekorosu's reply is about how to simulate colorblindness (so you can test how accessible a design is), for which there are plenty of great tools. Recently, I've liked http://colororacle.org/

Yet that's not really an answer for how to optimize for color blindness. That I don't know and would be interested in an answer.

One thing I noticed as someone with red-green colour blindness is that while the article claims that "darker magentas are more distinguishable than lighter ones", I saw lighter magentas as being more distinguishable than darker ones. So the perceptual distances between colours are probably different for us.

If high contrast between colours is desired, you could take some further precautions in some of the suggested algorithms, e.g. if you're choosing certain hues as a basis of your palette, then making sure that none of the pairs are problematic. If your algorithm checks the distance between colours to generate high-contrast pairs, then you could add in a check for problematic pairs as part of that step.

> I saw lighter magentas as being more distinguishable than darker ones.

How do you know that? How do you know you are looking to equivalent distributions of lighter and darker magentas?

I have some uncommon kind of color blindness, I have problems with blue and green. I don't even know what colors I can't see, I'd love to know the procedures for that.

I was looking at the sample image provided on the linked article for hue differentiation where for each of the three rows, the strips of colour differ by 5%. The three rows differ by brightness only. The article used this image to illustrate that "lighter blues is more distinguishable than darker blues, while darker magentas are more distinguishable than lighter ones", but to me both lighter blues and lighter magentas were more distinguishable than the darker counterparts.

Oh, of course.

I didn't understand that. Thanks.

Try http://colorbrewer2.org/ - it has a setting for colorblind safe...

There is an answered stackoverflow question with some info on math and a working demo http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12168795/algorithm-to-sim...