Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Reading/Accessibility for colour blind readers

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Accessibility for colour blind readers

CVD simulation
Normal CV
      
Protanpoia (~1% males)
      
Deuteranopia (~7% males)
      
  • Problem: There are templates which colour their different parts to be helpful for the readers, i.e. family trees coloured by gender. Such colouring may very well bother colour blind readers.
  • Who would benefit: Colour blind readers (1 in 12 men, 1 in 200 women)
  • Proposed solution: Colours generated by wiki code would be displayed differently (darker/brighter/simpler shades) for readers who clicked an accessibility button.
  • second proposition: Creating a tool that will read all templates and articles, categorising problematic articles and templates according to different problems (e.g. category:templatees with problematic red combination, category:templatees with too bright colours). After researching the problematic combination and individual colours, and creating the tool that combines the information each wiki can find it's way to solve the problems (e.g. W:HE:קטגוריה:שגיאות פרמטריות).
If accepted, a research of what colours are a problem needs to be done, and alternative colours need to be determined. Also the placing of the button needs to be determined.

Discussion[edit]

  • Automatic changing of colors may be problematic, as it would need to take into account all the colors as they're used in context rather than just changing each individual color. For example, changing green to blue for red/green colorblindness might work well to fix a template using red and green, but for a template using the three colors red, green, and blue that change might not work at all. Anomie (talk) 15:23, 15 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Shouldn't we discourage people from producing content like this in the first place ? Maybe have an evaluation option that alerts editors of mistakes like these ? —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 16:06, 15 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are some older notes and sites linked at Accessibility#Colour-blind-friendly images. I agree with TheDJ that it would be best to solve this in the original material (whether templates/CSS/diagrams/maps/etc, and for both text-contrast issues as well as purely-graphical color usage) - the most scalable way to achieve this, is by improving the documentation for best practices (however that is not a software issue so is out-of-scope for this wishlist). An evaluation tool for editors would also be good (perhaps one of the existing external tools is sufficient?). melo kol, I recommend you rewrite this proposal, to be focused specifically on a single software-solvable problem, e.g. an evaluation tool that editors can use to find/fix problems. Thanks :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 16 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    U:Quiddity (WMF), i added a second proposition, though my offer was planned in the first place to solve the problems you and the DJ added, what i meant was to adjust all colours, more like darkening them (pink=>red) than switching them with a total contrast (green=>red). melo kol (talk) 15:34, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have grant proposal for this: Grants:IEG/Color blindness content checker.
    What I have working for images is a CVD simulator (with two different implementations), a prototype for finding images with CVD issues, and pitching to people on my phone at Wikimania.
    Regarding HTML colors, in the rehabilitating the Green on black skin, I experimented with an automated method using ComputedStyle() to find templates using black text on transparent backgrounds. --Dispenser (talk) 18:28, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]