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Feature request: Colour blind mode

Open pjf opened this issue 10 years ago • 5 comments

SCANsat rocks so freakin' hard, thank you.

However, I happen to have colour blindness. All those times when indicator are blinking orange and green? Absolutely impossible for me to see.

Luckily, colour-blind friendly interfaces are pretty easy to design. Have a little "ideal altitude" light next to each scanner indicator, and light that up when we'd otherwise be seeing a "solid green". Bonus points if it flashes when we'd be in a "flashing orange" state

Alternatively, if we're talking about HSV colour spaces, then anything which varies the value (brightness) is colour-blind friendly. With the existing green/orange indicators, if the green was made brighter, and the orange made darker, then that would also work.

Many thanks again for a brilliant mod! I love your work!

~ pjf

pjf avatar May 19 '14 06:05 pjf

The blinking lights thing and the ideal altitude setting as it currently stands both aren't very good. A blinking indicator light is one option, at least as a stopgap measure, that shouldn't be too hard to implement.

DMagic1 avatar May 20 '14 02:05 DMagic1

It's interesting that an attempt to account for color blindness was undertaken with the Big Map, but evidently not with these icons.

technogeeky avatar May 20 '14 04:05 technogeeky

The color scheme in general is designed to be distinguishable for colorblind and non-colorblind people. There is a pretty interesting link in SCANui discussing the ideal color combinations to use: http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/

But you're right these icons switch between one of the barrier free colors, and one of the XKCD colors (pukegreen). Maybe just replacing that with the bluishgreen or the blue color would be enough.

DMagic1 avatar May 20 '14 04:05 DMagic1

I'm wondering if this color combination is any better for the flashing sensor indicators.

DMagic1 avatar Apr 15 '15 00:04 DMagic1

I'm wondering if this color combination is any better for the flashing sensor indicators.

I can't tell if an indicator is orange or green. Apparently in the image below it's flashing, but I can only just tell that BIO and ANOM are flashing if I spend 30 seconds staring at it with my brightness turned up to full. I honestly can't tell you what colour the probe is, or if "Scanner 6" changes colour at all:

As for v11rc3:

I know that 'HI' and 'Tester MK I' have colours, but again I can't tell you if they're orange or green; they certainly don't appear to be flashing, nor can I tell a difference from the old indicators. That's the thing about being colour-blind, figuring out colours (hue) is hard. :)

Any sort of visual mark-up that doesn't use colour would be excellent. A 'tick' that appears when we're at an ideal altitude, an up or down arrow if we're too low or too high, or even just a '*' to indicate that a part isn't ideal would all work great. (Although I understand such things may be tricky, as they'd involve potentially moving around UI elements.)

Many, many thanks again!

~ pjf

pjf avatar May 19 '15 12:05 pjf