[games_access] Color Blindness and Gaming Article

[d. michelle hinn]

Yes, color blindness is more complex than the writer of that article 
might suggest but, to me, it was nice to see someone say "hey, this 
is what sucks about games because I can't tell the colors apart" on a 
popular site. I know that after talking with Mark and Stephanie at 
AbleGamers that they want to help collect these stories too so that 
we can start getting these to the CEOs, etc. It was actually my boss 
who works in computational medicine that found the article (and he 
said he wasn't a gamer...hmmm...). :)

Nice link to the British Telecom stuff!

Michelle

>A consulting client just had me make a color-blind accessible interface.
>Seems that a Very Important User, i.e., someone with $$, is color blind.
>
>What I found out after some research is that from a UI perspective, 
>it's an issue of spectrum.
>
>Each of the 3 color blind types has a much more limited color 
>spectrum available.
>This makes it harder for the UI designer to assign colors, because 
>there are fewer colors to assign.
>
>To some degree this can be mitigated by labels, fonts, patterns, 
>shape, brightness, and motion.
>
>However, Iin the case of pie charts, where the items are not 
>necessarily ordinal and there may not be room for labels or 
>patterns, this is particularly difficult. What you end up doing is 
>picking judiciously from the very limited set of colors available.
>
>British Telcom has some immediately useful stuff on this at:
>http://www.btplc.com/age_disability/technology/RandD/colours/palfiles.htm
>
>John Bannick
>CTO
>7-128 Software
>
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