Beyond the Button

Museums have done an enormous amount of work making their spaces and exhibit interfaces accessible to those with physical differences, limitations, and disabilities. However, we have lots more work before we can claim such progress with digital and media interfaces.

One easy thing we can do right is design websites and media interactives for for the colorblind. An estimated 8% of the male population (roughly 12 million folks in the US) have some form of color blindness that can make it hard to use interfaces that rely on color to convey information.

I use two simple tools that help me test my designs for color blind users. They let me see what my work looks like through the eyes of some one who can't see the various differences between the shades of green, blue, or red.

Color Oracle

Color Oracle is great because it turns your entire screen color blind for a moment. Any movement of the mouse or clicks turn the display back to "normal."

Sim Daltonism

Sim Daltonism gives you a color blindness portal or window that lets you see little parts of your screen color blind live. This can be real nice for flash and moving images. But this can also be more memory and processor intensive if you are on a slow computer.

Both of these apps are for the Mac and I don't have any first hand experience with any PC tools. But Daltonize lets you test your interfaces over the web. You can upload an image and filter it for various types of color blindness.

I'd love to hear your tips about how you work to make your visual interfaces more accessible to all viewers.