Alternate color modes

[skade]

http://www.heise.de/forum/heise-online/News-Kommentare/Barrierefreiheit-Mapping-Projekt-zu-rollstuhlgerechten-Orten/Rot-Gruen-Stoerung/posting-23985224/show/

Our current label colors are green/yellow/red/grey, which is hard to use for people with color perception problems.

Is providing other color schemes feasible?

[kannes]

http://colorbrewer2.org/ offers scientifically designed safe schemes. Choose diverging and tick "colorblind safe".

[lennerd]

I like the idea of having an alternate color mode as an option. It's quite difficult to find three colors working good for people with and without color blindness.

We already chose a green (fully accessible) and a red (limited accessible) color to be as different as possible for both. You can test this with Photoshop (View > Proof Setup > Color Blindness).

But I will definitely will discuss this idea with the team. Maybe we can also tweak our color scheme to make the difference even more clear.

[kannes]

The easy solution would be not to rely on color but to use different symbology. For example you could overlay the http://asset3.wheelmap.org/assets/toolbar_marker_yes.png http://asset3.wheelmap.org/assets/toolbar_marker_no.png icons over the POI icon maybe.

[lennerd]

I'm not quite sure, how you would do this in detail. You mean, showing the symbol overlay when the user hovers the markers?

[holgerd]

my 5cents: @kannes The challenge is that we are already using icons to symbolize the place category (restaurant, pub, metrostation etc) and it is already a challenge to find clear icons for 100+ catetegories which are that small. I do not see how adding more symbols to each icon would make the user experience better. Maybe higher contrast of the colors helps.

People who can not distinguish the colors can already filter by yes/no/limited. It is a workaround, but one that works IMHO.

[xgebi]

I've seen Wheelmap for the first time yesterday at a11yBerlin but those colors irritated me a bit. @holgerd I think there is a value of using different shapes depending on the state of accessibility. But as I am not familiar with the current codebase I am not sure if I could demo it at the moment.

If I were implementing shapes instead of colors, I'd start with rotated square, triangle and circle. SVGs are for this quite easy to use. (I forgot the fourth which could probably remain as is or plain white with black icon)

These three(/four) are easily distinguishable.

[opyh]

Thanks for your input! You are totally right. You probably mean the currently deployed version – The new implementation of Wheelmap's redesign already includes a shape-based design additionally to colors.