11

I am red/green colorblind and I find it difficult to distinguish between the red and green circles that denote unanswered and answered questions:

Screenshot. Red and green circles on Ask Ubuntu homepage

Does it make sense to use, for example, a darker green if only a few percent of the user base will be affected by the problem?

2
  • 4
    This site gives you an idea on how we look like for red-green colorblind people: vischeck.com/vischeck
    – Takkat
    Jan 15, 2013 at 20:01
  • Its actually orange, not that it really matters if your colorblind...
    – Mateo
    Jan 15, 2013 at 20:35

2 Answers 2

11

Thank you for bringing this to attention, I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest instead an alternative to the full circle solution (much like FEichinger has suggested):

enter image description here

.unanswered .mini-counts {
  color: #666!important;
  border: 5px solid #dd4814;
  width: 30px !important;
  height: 22px !important;
  line-height: 20px !important;
}

Or, you know, tweak the green color. Also, scatter brain, make the orange have a dots pattern? Similar to that found on the Ubuntu branding page

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    What if we used the "Canonical circle icon" they allready use it for status icons, design.ubuntu.com/web/colour and we could add it for added emphasis on accepted answers, since 0 answer questions are already differentiated by not having any answers.
    – Mateo
    Jan 15, 2013 at 21:30
5

I gotta say, I never really considered it from that perspective. I mean, when you think about it, the whole "red and green as bad/good indicators" kinda doesn't make sense in that light in general. Buuuut ... I fully agree. That is likely to cause problems. And just changing the colours would probably create the same problem for the next set of colour-blind people.

Slightly enhanced suggestion

I doubt just changing the colours would be sufficient overall. Perhaps we could turn it from full-circle for unanswered to a thick border - to give a straight-forward visual feedback that is entirely independent from the colours?

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    Just changing the color will help a lot because only very few people suffer from color-blindness other than red/green. As many as 9 % of all men can't distinguish red from green too well.
    – Takkat
    Jan 15, 2013 at 19:56
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    @Takkat Oh, I fully agree that it will help a lot. But if we make an effort to root that out, we should go all the way, rather than "just" fixing the one right in front of us.
    – user98085
    Jan 15, 2013 at 20:00

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