Designing for color blindness is not "designing for a small minority." 300 million people worldwide are color blind. That's the entire population of the United States. More specifically: 8% of men and 0.5% of women have some form of color vision deficiency.
The brutal reality: if your design uses red/green to communicate ANYTHING (errors/success, buy/sell, hot/cold), you're failing ~5% of your male users. Here's how to fix it.
Trevor Henderson's redesign of UK traffic lights added shape-coding: green = circle, yellow = triangle, red = square. Color-blind drivers could identify the signal by shape alone. This is the gold standard for inclusive design.
Trello's color-blind mode replaces their default color labels with pattern overlays (stripes, dots, crosshatch) in addition to color. Users can toggle it in settings. The feature was built in a 2-day hackathon by a single engineer who was color-blind.
Financial trading platforms (Bloomberg Terminal, Robinhood) use directional arrows ↑↓ alongside red/green color coding, because a significant percentage of traders are color-blind men.
Trevor Henderson's redesign of UK traffic lights added shape-coding: green = circle, yellow = triangle, red = square. Color-blind drivers could identify the signal by shape alone. This is the gold standard for inclusive design.
Trello's color-blind mode replaces their default color labels with pattern overlays (stripes, dots, crosshatch) in addition to color. Users can toggle it in settings. The feature was built in a 2-day hackathon by a single engineer who was color-blind.
Financial trading platforms (Bloomberg Terminal, Robinhood) use directional arrows ↑↓ alongside red/green color coding, because a significant percentage of traders are color-blind men.
Trevor Henderson's redesign of UK traffic lights added shape-coding: green = circle, yellow = triangle, red = square. Color-blind drivers could identify the signal by shape alone. This is the gold standard for inclusive design.
Trello's color-blind mode replaces their default color labels with pattern overlays (stripes, dots, crosshatch) in addition to color. Users can toggle it in settings. The feature was built in a 2-day hackathon by a single engineer who was color-blind.
Financial trading platforms (Bloomberg Terminal, Robinhood) use directional arrows ↑↓ alongside red/green color coding, because a significant percentage of traders are color-blind men.
Trevor Henderson's redesign of UK traffic lights added shape-coding: green = circle, yellow = triangle, red = square. Color-blind drivers could identify the signal by shape alone. This is the gold standard for inclusive design.
Trello's color-blind mode replaces their default color labels with pattern overlays (stripes, dots, crosshatch) in addition to color. Users can toggle it in settings. The feature was built in a 2-day hackathon by a single engineer who was color-blind.
Financial trading platforms (Bloomberg Terminal, Robinhood) use directional arrows ↑↓ alongside red/green color coding, because a significant percentage of traders are color-blind men.
Use these free tools to apply what you learned: