Colour Blindness and Web design

I actually wrote this series of articles over tens years ago so the screen grabs below are rather dated, but do still show that choosing the right colour scheme makes your site easier to read to everyone. I suppose, in retrospect, I should have also used a series of images to show the reverse, how the wrong combinations can make your grand designs look like a blank page to some people! The degree of the colour blindness conditions makes a difference too – mild forms like protanomaly sees the colour muted whereas in the more severe protanopia, with the long cones absent, red is seen more like black.

Screen shots of Ackadia’s home page 2004 – build v6.0

Web page as seen by normal sighted people.

Same web page as might be seen with protanope (red) colour blindness. Notice how the ‘visited’ links for News and Computers are very hard to distinguish, compared to above.