Paul points out that he doesn’t have barriers all the time with the use of color alone, particularly red and green, but when he has a blocker, it’s a doozy.
Transcript
Nic
Hi, I’m Nic Steenhout. And you’re listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairment, and what barriers they encounter on the web. Today I’m talking with Paul Fenwick. Hey, Paul, how are you?
Paul
Hi, I am doing pretty well today. How are you doing, Nic?
Nic
I’m doing good. Very happy to talk to you. We’ve bumped into each other, I think in New Zealand, in Australia in the States, but it’s been several years since we have had a chance to speak properly.
Paul
It has back in the before times.
Nic
The before times. That’s right. Let me ask you the first question I ask all my guests What’s your disability or your impairment?
Paul
So the one that we’ll be talking about today is colorblindness, I have good old garden variety red green colorblindness, which means that I can still see colors just not as well as somebody without colorblindness.
Nic
When you say you have red green colorblindness, does that mean that red and green are exactly the same? Or they’re brownish? Or they’re slightly different twos? What does that mean?
Paul
So if you look at it from a biological standpoint, the receptors which pick up green and red light in my eyes, there, there’s some overlap in the spectrums which they fire from. And what this means is, I still see, when I look at something which is green, I think it’s green, when I look at something which is red, it looks like it’s red. But if something is low saturation, if it is washed out, if it’s a dark lighting, those sorts of situations, I can’t necessarily tell and how this manifests is not me saying like, Oh, it’s like gray, or it’s brown. Human brains are fascinating. So my brain just fills it in with what color logically makes sense there. And we do this all the time. If you are in a dark room, then everyone’s color vision is impaired. But we still see all the plant over there is green, even though your eyes are incapable of perceiving green at that point, because it just gets filled in. And this was really interesting when I was a child, because I remember one day I came home from school, my parents had repainted the lounge room. And I’m like, Oh, wow, like what a lovely shade of green, you’ve painted the lounge room. And they’re like, Paul, it’s, it’s not green. And I’m like, oh, oh, it’s it’s like, it’s like a peach color that’s really lovely like that matches the furniture, like pullets, it’s not peach, and I’m like, Well, what color is it then. And they had painted the room gray. And in my mind, my parents would never paint the room Gray, that would just be a little bit too boring. So I immediately filled it in with a color which made sense with the rest of the furniture and the rest of the house. And so that was sort of a bit of a moment for me relaxed, realizing that, wow, I really do have colorblindness because as a child, I would deny it a lot. And at this point, it was like, Oh, wow, that is actually a thing.
Nic
So I assume you’re not a child anymore. You’ve made these realizations, you’ve probably developed some coping strategies. But we’re here talking about barriers you encounter on the web. So what kind of barriers you encounter directly related to color blindness.
Paul
So the number one… the number one thing which I hit all the time, with my color blindness, there are different types of colorblindness is specifically using red and green to convey information when there is no other channel. Alongside that to convey the same information. And unfortunately, that is extremely common, that we will use green to indicate something’s good red to indicate something as bad. If there’s an orange in there as well, that just makes it even worse, because that’s an intermediate color between the two. And I encountered this all the time on the web, and also in consumer, Alex, electronics as well, to where you’ll have green and red lights to indicate something. And if it’s a very bold, saturated green or red, maybe I can tell you, but really the best thing is you have like a green tick or a Red Cross or something else there to indicate what the actual status is.
Nic
Yeah, I think I’ve seen a lot of toggles where, you know, on the one side, you have a bit of green on the other side, you have a bit of red and which side is which?
Paul
Yeah.
Nic
Yeah.
Paul
Well, even if it’s a toggle where it’s moving left or right, that’s at least an extra piece of information. But I’m actually looking with the software which we’re using now. And below us. There’s Paul and there’s Nick and there’s two dots which I think Green. But if they weren’t green, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell. There’s an example right here in front of us.
Nic
Yes. Well, Zencastr accessibility is a is another question entirely. I’ve been on their back for five years now to improve that. But that’s another question. Right? So toggles and consumer electronics are, are a barrier. If you were to quantify how much of an annoyance it is, on your day to day basis, what would you say it is?
Paul
It is something which I mostly forget about it until there is something that, like, there’s no other choice but using color. So there has been so many monitoring systems I’ve used, like during my time in DevOps, and before that, when we call it system administration. And you’d have like these beautiful displays of here’s everything, which is working well and not, and it would be all red, green coded. And unless there was something else there, I had a really hard time telling. And it was really a case of having to concentrate and say like, okay, well what color is that. So for a lot of things I don’t notice because it’s you know, traffic lights, you have positions, and a lot of things naturally in the environment you don’t have to worry about, but when it’s like, here’s a status display, involved with video games, working in the United States as a video game developer, and anytime you have video games, people love to just put it all it’s have green and reds to show things, this text will turn green when it’s available. And this will go green when it can such and such and I often can’t tell or it takes me an extra moment to tell. So it is it is something which I am mostly able to work around. But when it’s noticeable, it’s it’s very, very noticeable. The other thing that comes up with is fashion. And that can be much, much more amusing. i For years I had a t shirt that I put in the wash, and some of my bedsheets had stained it, I had these bright red bedsheets and the color leaked. And so I had this this pink t shirt, which I didn’t know was pink. So everyone thought I was making a fashion statement wearing these pink clothes around. And I think it was a pink dress shirt in there as well for the same reason. And I just I just had no idea. So that was very amusing. But that was something I was completely unconscious of.
Nic
So it doesn’t have to be a daily frustration a daily annoyance. It’s you know, you ignore it, you ignore it, you ignore it, and then suddenly, bam, you’re blocked.
Paul
Yes, yes.
Nic
Yeah.
Paul
There have been times with open source tools where like, you know, I’ve injected my own custom stylesheet or something. So I can see what’s going on. Because otherwise it’s just using colors. Yeah. Yeah. So it really is, most of the time not a problem. And then sometimes yeah, as you said, boom, I’m blocked. I’m not sure what this is.
Nic
If you had one message for designers or developers around accessibility, what would it be?
Paul
So with relation to colorblindness, do not use color as your only way of conveying information. And you see this lots and lots of times you have something’s wrong in a monitoring system, have an emoji of something being on fire that works really, really well. It’s extremely noticeable. If you’re not sure if using color as your only source of information, take a screenshot and just desaturate it entirely. And people say to me, like what like, is this screen strong enough for you? And I’m like, well, there’s lots of different types of colorblindness. Just take the screenshot completely desaturate it, can you still tell what’s going on? And this is something that we like back in the way before times when we only had black and white televisions. This is something that people would think about, it’s like, how does this look like in black and white because a lot of our audience will be viewing that. So if you can tell what’s going on completely desaturating everything excellent and then color can enhance that information as opposed to being the only source of that information.
Nic
Fantastic. Thank you. Paul this has been really good. Thank you for sharing your your barriers and colorblindness and I bet you love the classic Christmas colors right?
Paul
Oh I love Christmas for the ridiculousness, the whole commercialized Christmas let’s have parades and let’s have tinsel and let’s have all of these things which are very much modern inventions. I actually adore that because of the frivolity associated with it and the whimsy associated with it. But no, I can’t I can’t tell whatever’s going on with Christmas. I also live in Australia. So Christmas happens in the middle of the summer. And it was only when I moved to the United States for a while that I realized that oh, it makes sense to have like all these heavy warm foods during this time and wear warm clothes because yeah, in Australia, that does not make sense at all. You wear a lot of sunscreen.
Nic
I remember people in New Zealand, spraying you know, the snow thing in the window.
Paul
Yes.
Nic
All right. Paul, thank you so much for being such a good guest and we’ll bump into each other on the interwebs
Paul
My absolute pleasure, Nic, thank you so much for having me on. Cheers.