Inclusive Design For Colorblindness

Statistically speaking most people with a moderate form of red/green color blindness will only be able to identify accurately 5 or so colored pencils from a standard box of 24 pencil crayons.
Ivan Tuchkov

Welcome to Group 3 webpage focusing on color blindness and inclusive webpage design! In our project we discuss color blindness and how this impacts website design and inspect information structure and architecture presented on National Park Service website for Kenai Fjords National Park, US. We will also provide our own suggestions for how information on this site could be improved to serve the color blind better.

What is inclusive design?

Inclusive design can be defined as a designing with a focus on making the product or service available for as many people as possible, in particular those groups that are traditionally excluded from accessing services or using an interface. The focus in inclusive design is to ensure that as many user needs can be fulfilled as possible. Inclusive design may address accessibility, age, economic situation, geographic location, language, race, and more.

Why does inclusive design for colorblindness matter?

It is estimated that generally 8% of men and 0.5% of women worldwide have a type of color vision deficiency. In total there are about 300 million color-blind people around the world, a number equivalent to the total population of the US. As such, whilst color blindness is statistically rare, the number of color-blind users is significant. Types of colorblindness are commonly divided into two different categories: Red-Green color deficiency and Blue-Yellow color deficiency.

Should color blindness not be considered during the website design phase, the webpage may prove to be impractical for colorblind visitors. Whilst colorblind people usually do recognize colors, they might struggle with distinguishing tones such as red, yellow, blue and green. This means that different colors may appear similar, causing problems in website usability: text becomes unreadable, navigation buttons inconspicuous and pictures and maps difficult to use. Inclusive design provides win-win –situation for both parties: by focusing on inclusivity, the website is available to a greater number of users, which in turn ensures that the website creator gets to enjoy increased traffic on their site.