There’s a number hiding in this picture – do you see it?  If not, you’re colorblind.

Okay, that wasn’t entirely true.  You may not be colorblind, but you’re seeing this image as a colorblind person might, and I want everyone to get a sense for what that feels like.  Too often, we design graphs and images with colors that are indistinguishable by the colorblind population (some estimates say 8% of males and 2% of females).

Think about your last audience, either a presentation you gave or a document you created.  If there were 50 people present, between 1 and 4 of them may have missed the point of your slides, or struggled to see the trend you were trying to show because the colors ran together.  Can you afford to lose that many, when it’s relatively simple to engage them along with the rest of the audience?

Here’s the original, non-edited image, which >90% of you will be able to see.

Cut your colorblind friends a break and visit Vischeck.com for more examples of what the world looks like through colorblind eyes, and learn about an algorithm that will convert your red-green heavy images to a friendlier format. (I’m looking at you, cell biologists with your GFP and Rhodamine!)

Or visit wearecolorblind.com to improve your graphs and webpages.  Colorbrewer also has some helpful color schemes, even if you’re not into maps.

Want to present your graphs to babies?  Check out tinyeyes.com for the scoop! (And yes, that was a joke…)

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