Playing board-games is great fun and a lovely pastime. One of the most famous among them is Trivial Pursuit. Chris Haney and Scott Abbott invented it in 1979. Trivial Pursuit was finally launched in 1981 and started its triumphal procession all around the world. It is now sold in at least 19 different languages spread over 33 countries.

It is a great game and I do love playing it. Everybody is eager to answer the imaginative questions and to collect the sought-after plastic pie slices. Everybody has his favourite area of questions and therefore his favourite color, as every of the six question areas is expressed through a distinct color. But the inventors made one big mistake which they never really eliminated.

Have you ever played Trivial Pursuit with a colorblind? It is still fun but sometimes it degenerates to a color guessing and asking game. The six different colors used to reflect the six different question areas are definitely not well chosen for people affected by a color vision deficiency.

Imagine the following two different situations are reoccurring all the time during the game.

Colorblind: “Ok. I landed on green. I love green question.”
Not-Colorblind: “Wrong. You are on brown.”
Colorblind: “Oh no. Come on, this is green.”
Not-Colorblind: “No, definitely not.”
Colorblind: “Ok. Let me move again. I hate brown questions.”
Not-Colorblind: “Ok. Last time.”
Colorblind: “Thanks.” (Move) “Now, ask me the green question.”
Not-Colorblind: “Ohm, sorry. But this time you landed on orange…”

This was the first situation which happens all the time to me. I’m constantly asking if I got the colors right or if I mixed them up again.

In second situation the roles are swaped. But it is therefore not less common than the one described above.

Colorblind: “And the blue question for you is: …”
Not-Colorblind: “Stop, stop. It is not blue. It is pink.”
Colorblind: “Yes? Oh yes. I want to kid me again.”
Not-Colorblind: “No. Honestly, it is pink and not blue.”
Colorblind: “But last time you told me differently.”
Not-Colorblind: “Who is having problems with colors here?”
Colorblind: “Ok, ok. Next time I’m going to mark every single field…”

As I said, I really like this game very much and we quite often play it. But I would like it even more if they had chosen better colors or some kind of patterns which can be easily told apart from each other.

There are many different editions of Trivial Pursuit. Maybe there is even one where they have chosen another color strategy. Did you ever play such a colorblind-sensitive one?

Further readings:
Canada Heirloom Series: Trivial Pursuit
Wikipedia: Trivial Pursuit

At the Traffic Light

April 16, 2006

@colblindor

Pics 11 Comments

Was Katrina Colorblind?

April 15, 2006

@colblindor

Thoughts No Comments

Richard Valenty a writer of the Colorado Daily News raises in a recent news story the question:

“Might post-Katrina rescue efforts have been better if the citizens of New Orleans were predominantly white or of a higher socioeconomic class?”

Even as somebody not directly involved, living in another part of the world, this makes me think and I hope it is not true.

This kind of color blindness is different to a color vision deficiency. But both share some similaraties which have to be reconsidered.

Both can and often are inherited from parents to their children. White or black, higher or lower class is often a mental attitude passed on from parents to their children. It is not present all of a sudden, it grows slowly and steadily.
Both can see colors but have problems to classify them correctly. It is not about not being able to see the colors but about categorizing, sorting and classifying.
Both are not talked about in public. People are hiding behind flowery phrases, don’t want to admit it and play it down.

I hope everybody can learn from Katrina and hopefully make it better if something like this ever happens again. It doesn’t only happen in this enormity. No. Sadly color blindness can be observed everyday on the roads and at work. Everybody has to work on it in the small to change it slowly but steadily in the large.

Direct link to the news story: Was Katrina Colorblind

Coloring Easter Eggs

April 14, 2006

@colblindor

Thoughts No Comments

Today is Good Friday and everybody enjoys Easter vacation. Eggs are getting colored, hidden, searched for and found – most of the time.

I was just wondering what some fellow bloggers say about Coloring Easter Eggs. As there are so many possibilities to do it and so many colors to choose from it would be interesting to learn some more about it. Here you go.

Mary has some tipps about coloring at Victorian Easter Eggs
ecofriend proclaims Go Green This Easter: Color Your Easter Eggs Organic
Anne Marie shares her ideas about Decorating Easter eggs the allergy free way
Lea has a recipe how to Make Tie-Dye Easter Eggs
Tammy shares with us a tremendous list of Easter Wisdom
JO has a couple of nice paintings about Spring: Coloring Easter Eggs

Very very nice. Our easter eggs are already colored and some of them already filled my stomach. Yummie.

What do you think about: How to color your Easter eggs, that your colorblind son (or husband) will never find them? Or what is your favourite color, coloring and especially hide technique?

Web Site Accessibility

April 13, 2006

@colblindor

Web No Comments

ClearFlite Air Purifiers improved the accessibility of their web site. According to the news ClearFlite Air Purifiers Announces W3C Compliant Visually Impaired Web Site the company just released a new Accessible section on their site designed for people not only with severe visual impairment but also for those affected by color blindness.

Visiting their site including the Accessible section and speaking from a colorblind point of view I would like to share some universally valid conclusions.

Defective Color Vision ≠ Visual Impairment
Don’t lump together people affected by color blindness and people with a severe visual impairment. A color vision deficiency doesn’t conclude poor eyesight. Therefore there is no sense in putting up a page written in large letters and suppose that somebody affected by color blindness makes use of it.
Design your Main Sites Colorblind Friendly
If you want to improve the accessibility for people affected by color blindness think about redesigning your main site. Remember approximately every tenth men has some kind of color blindness and choosing some colorblind friendly color combinations usually doesn’t hurt that much.
Point out your Efforts
There is no reason why you shouldn’t point out to all visitors that you made some special efforts to improve the accessibility of your site. People appreciate it, the one’s who can make use of it can easily find and understand your efforts and with all other’s you will score well.

Think about these points when you have plans improving the accessibility of your web site.

Direct link to the news article: ClearFlite Air Purifiers Announces W3C Compliant Visually Impaired Web Site

Improve your English Skills

April 11, 2006

@colblindor

News No Comments

The previous week Colblindor was featured at ProBlogger in the blog case studies series. Many comments were posted to give me some really good advice.

Improving my English skills I will take to heart. It will not be easy because English is not my mother tongue. But as one reason for this blog is to improve my written English I will keep an eye on it through:

Word spell and grammar checking
Common Errors in English
A Preposition Training Book
Online German-English Translator

But nevertheless I will stick to the spelling color (American English) and will not change it to colour (British English). I love British English don’t get me wrong on that. But after checking the two spellings with some keyword analyze tools I concluded that more people are looking up the word color than colour. Just some SEO here.

One last point: Doesn’t color blindness excuse for spelling and grammar mistakes?

Colorblind Web Page Filter

April 10, 2006

@colblindor

Tools 3 Comments

The Colorblind Web Page Filter is a great web application to get an impression how a web page is viewed by people affected by any kind of color blindness. After indicating the URL and choosing the appropriate color filter the view is directly shown inside the browser window.

In addition to the web page a settings box is shown on top of the page. This box offers all the different color filters and does switch the view after choosing a new filter. As well some settings concerning scripts, images and CSS can directly be adjusted. Turning off images makes the transformation process remarkably faster. But this usually isn’t appropriate because images are an important design element in web pages which shouldn’t be underestimated.

To get an impression what it looks like try one of these direct links:

Maybe you should check your own web page or blog to find some potentially blind spots. Remember, there are between 8% and 12% of men affected by some kind of color blindness. If you count on visitors, count on the colorblinds too.

Direct link to Colorblind Web Page Filter.

Daltonism – Named after John Dalton

April 9, 2006

@colblindor

People 16 Comments

John Dalton was the first scientist to take academic interest in the subject of color blindness. He was born September 6, 1766 in Eaglesfield, England and died July 27, 1844 of paralysis. One of the first scientific papers John Dalton published was titled “Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours” and released in 1793.

Starting his career as a teacher he got interested in meteorology and mathematics. As Jonathan, his seven years older brother and John himself both were affected by red-green color blindness he also started some observations and researches about color vision.

“That part of the image which others call red appears to me little more than a shade or defect of light. After that the orange, yellow and green seem one colour which descends pretty uniformly from an intense to a rare yellow, making what I should call different shades of yellow”

He postulated that shortage in color perception was caused by discoloration of the liquid medium of the eyeball called aqueous humour. According to his research he believed that the aqueous humour was bluish and therefore filtered out all the colors. His observations and writings formed the expression Daltonism as a common wording for color blindness.

Through his lifetime John Dalton became a well known and respectable chemist and physicist and was one of the early proponents of the Atomic Theory. One of his last wills was to get an autopsy of his eyes after death. Unfortunately there wasn’t any bluish liquid found. It was his final experiment and proved that the condition called Daltonism is not caused by the eye itself, but some deficient sensory power.

Further readings:
WWNFF: John Dalton
Biography of John Dalton
Wikipedia: John Dalton
Notable Names Database: John Dalton

Shopping for my Boy

April 8, 2006

@colblindor

Stories 5 Comments

We have something going on here in Switzerland called Children Cloth Exchange (Kleiderbörse). Almost every village organizes some of those exchanges during the year. You can bring the children cloths you don’t need anymore, add a price tag and hope somebody will buy it. And of course you can buy clothes from others at very cheap prices. It’s kind of a secondhand party for children.

Last week one of those exchanges was organized just around the corner. And we made a big deal: we bought a bike trailer seating two children, very cheap and in very good condition (color: yellow).

When I went along to the place to pick up the trailer, I had a look around for some other clothes. Our boy is now just over 8 month and he needs new clothes all the time. I found two nice shirts, bought them and placed them proudly on the table at home so my wife can see my catch when she gets home from work.

She got home, looked at them and said: “Well nice. But the color…”

Colorblind People are Dumb

April 7, 2006

@colblindor

Pics 4 Comments

Please all read aloud: Colorblind People are Dumb. Now this is from a man of genius. It is written with green letters on a red background — a nightmare for red-green colorblinds.

But I can read it. (Think). My doctor says I am very much colorblind. And even some color blindness tests show me that I am definitely not only slightly red-green colorblind.

What about you? Anybody here who can’t read it?

A smart guy with a smart idea and a dump realisation. Maybe he should have asked a colorblind friend of him (and he will definitely have one as there are so many affected) before he released the picture at flickr.