In The Land of the Colour Blind

Opinion from Matt - Sunday, 22 February 2009 @ 10:55pm

There's a lot of wrong information here, so as someone who is "colour blind" let me clear it up.

Colour blindness is something that almost exclusively men get, and we get it from our mothers. It's something carried by women and given to men, like haeomophilia, and sin.

About 8% of men have some form of it. That means that of people reading this there could be as many as 20 or 30 who have it. Probably 10 who don't even know.

First of all, most people who are "colour blind" are not in fact "colour blind". The term colour blind specifically refers to an utter inability to see colour, and the sloppy term just adds confusion. "Red/Green Colour Deficiency" is what I have. The there are two sets of cells in the eye, rods that see "lightness" and cones that see colour. Of the cones there are three types, commonly known as red, green and blue, though they're not quite as they cover a spectrum each. In one or two of those types (most commonly the red and green ones) there aren't quite as many cells as there should be, reducing the intensity of the colour.

The amount of difference varies person to person, but the vast majority (such as myself) have a minor 5% or so drop in colour intensity of a colour.

Here is a quick response to your next question:

We can see red and green fine. Thank you for asking.

We can see traffic lights. They're different enough, and besides, they've been in the same positions for 30 years.

Yes, stop signs are red. We know that.

Oranges are orange. We've got minor colour vision defects, not SIDS.

Fire engines do not "vanish".

Your shirt is blue. We're fine with blue.

Yes, his shirt is red. Her bag is a slightly darker red. That sign is orange. Your shoes are brown. I hate this game.

So what is the difference? Subtle things. We really can tell the difference between red and green, and between purple and blue and yellow. A plum and a sapphire are pretty different colours, and stop signs and forests look thoroughly different. These things have vivid differences, but mostly they have a lot of the colour in question.

What makes it hard is when there isn't much colour. Remember how I said we don't have as many of the colour cells? Well, that gives us less ability to detect that colour, a lower overall intensity. Removing colour intensity further or doing anything that reduces our ability to detect it makes it harder still.

One example is putting smaller amounts of colour. Large blocks of colour are quite easy to tell, there is more of the colour, a larger sample, if you wish. Seeing colour in a big square is much easier than seeing it in text, as the thin lines provide relatively little colour to sample.

Another issue is dark colours. Dark green and dark red have less colour in them, the black essentially encroaching on the colour, and that makes them harder to tell. Brighter, more vivid colours are far more easy to tell than the dark green that approaches brown and the dark red of dried blood.

Colours with reduced opacity are also a pain. If the red is transparent it's going to not have much red left when it's on the grey floor.

Another common way we end up with relatively little colour is LEDs. Light Emitting Diodes emit light. Man, I rock at this writing stuff. Anyway, the light they emit is often coloured, to provide a visual cue, a representation of "good" (green) or "bad" (red). This is common for things like the Nintendo DS, which shows it's running out of battery by making the light red. The problem is that the saturation of colour is quite low, and the brightness high, essentially "washing out" the colour. This makes the green/red colours extremely difficult to differentiate for a person with poor colour vision. Amber type colours are often not much better. This makes it common for someone like me to suddenly run out of battery as the DS didn't provide a battery warning visible to me. (The PSP gets around this issue by just always being out of batteries.)

Oh, and I fail at Zone 3 or laser tag type things as well... red and green LED lit vests just look too similar. I have to be on a yellow or blue team, if possible.

Reticles and HUD elements are a common issue, with a single pixel line of colour dubious intended to convey critical information. Friendly fire incidents are common among us colour tards, as the muddy green and the muddy red fail to mean a damn thing to us. Shoot first and apologise later, I say.

Telling enemy units from our own can be difficult if the visual cues are colour based. Unless my guys wear a yellow jacket and their guys wear a natty blue one I'm prety much reliant on whether they are shooting at me and yelling "SCHNELL!".

A thread on GameSpot's forum shows a perfect example of colour vision, both in the issues people have and the incredible lack of understanding. The thread is someone complaining about telling the difference between the blue and the purple items in World of Warcraft.

People immediately seem to arc up, saying "there's no such thing as blue and purple colour blind" and most saying that colour doesn't matter, "what are you stats blind as well? lololrofl".

If there's no reason to bother with colour to determine "epicness" why even have colours at all? Why not just have them all the same colour? The fact is the colour gives an immediate and obvious (to you norms) visual clue that one would expect a specifically high standard of spec from this item. It's not a visual necessity, but it IS a visual clue, and one that would be welcome to those of us who can't see it properly.

As for the purple/blue colourblind, that just goes to show how much people don't get it. What's the difference between blue and purple? I'll give you a clue: red. Actually that's more of an answer than a clue. The amount of red in it determines whether something is blue or purple, and when you can't see that red properly the amount of "purpleness" is reduced.

Another thing that I find interesting is blood. I don't mean that in a Dexter kind of way. There's a vivid red to the fresh blood in a jar in your fridge or sprayed from your latest screaming prostitute "patient" onto the sterile white walls of the secret basement where you perform your "surgery". But the stains of old blood that are intended to give atmosphere to the dark corner of old abandoned hotel in a survival horror might as well have been mess from an oil change as far as my vision goes.

There are two games I'd like to point out now. One is Killzone 2. From the point of view of a militant colour spaz there's very little they've done wrong. Course, the game is incredibly generic and unoriginal, but we're talking colour here, not content. It's particularly good that the colours between the HUD reticle are a kind of bright almost limey green for your guys, and a deep dark red for the enemy. The difference is immediate for those many with mild colour vision.... improvements.

The other game that deserves mention is Little Big Planet. It's not relevant, it's just fucking awesome and I don't think people are playing it enough.

So what do I want? Well, there's a long list and the first three are holes in Megan Fox, but the relevant ones are that I want game developers to actually THINK about this. If nearly 1/10 males are going to struggle with your crappy colour scheme, revise it. Do you need to use red and green? Why not blue, or yellow? Red and yellow are distinctly different, as are red and blue. If you must stick with a specific colour scheme why not find colours with very different saturations and brightnesses, and check with someone who has colour vision problems. Don't just show them two giant swatches and ask if they can tell the difference... show them the text you were going to use. Show them the cursor or selected state.

Most of all, here's a weird one - why not give us an option? Why not allow us to set the enemy colour? Why not allow us to change the text colour of the purple items? Why not have a checkbox for "colour vision" that swaps out certain pallates?