Wednesday, April 07, 2010

To the author...

...of the poster I saw yesterday.

Red text on a green background. Really? Did you even think about that for one moment? Aside from the fact it's really, really hard to read for those of us with decent eyesight, what about the ~8% of the population who are colorblind? Most of whom have red-green colorblindness?


Oh wait. It was a public service thing, right? A test for red-green colorblindness for those in the poster session! How clever...



Odyssey's red-green color blind test.



Or maybe you're just a moron.

7 comments:

Prof-like Substance said...

I had a committee member who was red/green color blind, so I could never get away with figures that had those two colors in them. Also differentiating between purple and brown was a problem as well.

Patchi said...

My dad is red/green color blind and pastel colors are also hard to distinguish. He had a student completely redo her thesis because the graphs were all in pastel colors and he couldn't distinguish a thing. He also hates microarray experiments because all he can see is the yellow.

I'm a carrier. So far my 2 boys seem to be able to distinguish colors...

Anonymous said...

Although the red and green are not perceived as such, contrast is generally more important in design; high contrast text-to-background fairing pretty well most times. The greater crime here is the garish red and green choices.

Deuteranope:
http://vischeck.homeip.net/uploads/127066670821229/

Protanope:
http://vischeck.homeip.net/uploads/127066680621440/

Unknown said...

I try to do all my images in RG colorblind-friendly format to accommodate.

In at least one case, this meant converting a 3-color RGB image to 3 panels of 2-color green-magenta.

None of my committee members were colorblind and they flipped the fuck out because I was "unnecessarily complicating" the presentation of my data. I pointed out that probably greater than 8% (given over-rep of white males in the field) of the target audience for my publication was likely to disagree, and they said "so what? everyone publishes in RGB - they're used to it". ARGH! So frustrating.

Arlenna said...

okayeeeee, I CAN read that but that does not mean that I WANT or LIKE to...

it feels like looking directly into the sun.

Anonymous said...

Red/Green?! Are they doing science or doing pre-school?

-antipodean

Odyssey said...

Science? Who knows. It was too hard to read.