Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The US takes English for granted so often, despite our actual diversity and no "official" language. Although I do love the National Park standardized symbols.

But to totally wander down your tangent, color can be dangerous to rely on for accessibility reasons.

Green in particular, seems like a poor color choice for accessibility, given the prominence of red/green colorblindness.

I worked on an internal system with a Web UI once with someone much less sensitive to this than I was. He wasn't a jerk, just would do things and didn't like revisiting to change. I'm generally not a UI person and got tired of fussing about it, so just rolled with his "it's just internal" for his parts.

One of the things he made would highlight rows of text by changing the color from grey to red without any other visual indicator (bold, etc.). The grey text already annoyed me, but that's a different story.

Our very first user when we piloted just happened to be red/green colorblind and was completely confused. It didn't occur to him that color was the issue, and my coworker didn't understand why he couldn't differentiate. It dawned on me to tell him that the selections were red, and ask if he was colorblind. We walked through the rest of it with him and found another place where red and green text were used to indicate "good" and "bad".

A week later, my coworker took colorblind-support as a 'requirement' and had reworked everything he did to ensure multiple visual cues. When he did decide to fix something, he was very thorough. And I'm sure he carried this forward to everything he's done since.

I'm not an expert, but I think the red/green issue is the most common (especially for men), but I know there are other varieties, and other vision problems can make color difficult.

I think that the figure running through the door is a great example of a good symbol, though. No reliance on language and an easily identifiable shape. But I'm definitely not an expert in either accessibility or design. I just try my best at both when I have to do that stuff.




I take accessibility very seriously. A lot of the stuff I've written has been fairly critical to people's lives.

I use Sim-Daltonism[0] a lot. It's awesome.

[0] https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/


That is awesome. I've just been using my old film photography experience of trying to "see" in black and white, but this is so much better.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: