blindpete

Hi Jon,

I am red green color blind and I find your site extremely difficult to read. Can you add a bit more contrast in format template your using... For example may be make the background a much lighter grey? Or perhaps one day allow users to choose their own format... I know that's an ability in some other forum engines, I'm not familier with vBulletine.

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-Pete
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Jon

Hmm.. never heard this one before. I'll see what we can do to accommodate you.

Just curious, what color do you see at a Red or Green light when driving?

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blindpete

LOL! You know, thats the 1st question 99% of people ask me! For me both Red and Green are black... or varying shades of grey depending on the relative intensity of the surrounding colors. I have few if any red/green receptors but I do have superb night vision as a result of the defect.

That said I can read your site, I just have to adjust the laptop screen to get good reflection (you know that effect most people adjust the screen positon to avoid!) when I have trouble. Truely I am used to doing it... all the time. I very much appreciate the attention to the issue and even if nothing changes I'll continue to visit your site.

Traffic Signals:
Where I live currently the lights are one on top of the other Red, Yellow, Green. So by position I have no issues. However recently (last couple years) the lights are steadily be replaced by diode based lights... they are not as bright, so the red and green are hard for me to see. Sadly I rely on other drivers for ques. Most often my wife drives and I avoid traffic when I have to. :-)

Someplaces downtown (Baltimore for example) the lights are horizontal in spots. That always give me trouble becuase they are not always left to right.

Mostly I just drive with the flow in the right lane. ;-)

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-Pete
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Mark

What does the site look like to you right now? I would have thought a darker grey would offer better contrast to the white writing, but am I wrong?

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blindpete

Sorry I was more then a little unclear. Phone rang while I was writing that post.

In the post message area, the text edit box comes up with gray background on gray text, At least in FF on windows. I'm using Safari to write this post and it comes up as black text on white background and is very readable.

The site as a whole is dark, dark backgrounds and white text. I can see the orangie links just fine, but I do have trouble with all the grays. I just see better with light back grounds and dark text. I dont suppose that makes much sence... its rahter hard to describe.

Anyhow as I said above, I like the site and can read the content more easily with some screen angle adjustment. A technique I apply a hundred times a day. ;-)

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-Pete
RPG Game variants, tools, rules and reviews

Jon

Well, I'm not sure there is anything we can do for you, but I did submit a support ticket with vBulletin to ask them if they could make an option that allows colorblind people to adjust the colors of the site for themselves to make it easier.

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J-Tag

You could always get Firefox, and follow these instructions: http://persistent.info/archives/2004...gmail-skinning
but in your custom .css file, use vbmenu_control#wickedfire-com { background: #000; } or whatever you would like.

blindpete, we have flashing green or flashing orange or flashing red lights around here, telling you that it's either a pedestrian controlled cross-walk, to be careful, or that the intersection's a 4-way stop. I understand that you can tell at regular lights what is green/red based on which of the 3 are lit, but what do you do with the lights as mentioned above?

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blindpete

Hello J-Tag,

Sorry it took so long to reply, I had to try out your idea and needed time to do so. It worked! A prestige bump for!

Orange flashing lights are no problem. Flashing Yellow are also ok. Flashing Red can be... but only if I am in an unfamiliar place and only if its a single light on the string. Sometimes here we loose power and the control system goes down, the lights flash yellow or red depending on their setup, but I can tell by their position in the stack what they mean. If not I can take ques from other cars... or if their are no cars... I just assume its an all way stop. Since there are no other cars no one cares! ;-)

Anyhow all of this makes it sound like a continuously analyse the the traffic signals. Well I do, but not consciencly, its just normal back of the mind instinct for me.

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-Pete
RPG Game variants, tools, rules and reviews

Jon

Red/Green colorblind.. So all the christmas colors look Black and White to you?

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ergophobe

Jon,

I wrote up a fairly extensive post about this at WebmasterWorld and it's been plagiarized a few times, so it must be okay.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum116/18.htm

That might help. There was also an evolt article on it not so long ago

http://evolt.org/node/60472

BTW, I have written to secretaries of transportation suggesting that a simple solution for the traffic lights would be

- red square = stop
- yellow triangle = caution
- green circle = go

This would make our streets safer. Most of us go by position, but when you have a single flashing light, is it yellow or red? I have to just stop unless my wife is in the car. Someday I know I'm going to get rear-ended at a flashing yellow.

ergophobe

PS personally I don't have any troubles with your site. Generally a good test is to take a screenshot and then convert to greyscale. If the contrast is high enough, it will work. If you do things like have red and green of similar luminosity, it looks clearly "contrasty" to someone with good color vision, but there's nothing there for us color impaired. On many sites I have to do a text select, which shifts the color values and that them readable. Sometimes I'm not even sure there's text there until I select.

blindpete

Wow great post ergophobe!
Thanks for the links and bump in your prestige too!

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-Pete
RPG Game variants, tools, rules and reviews

ergophobe

Thanks. I had no clue what you were talking about, but now i see the "bump prestige" button for every user. That post and, of all things, one about unicode detection and conversion in PHP have taken on lives of their own.

The colorblind one is hilarious in that it prompted some guy to go off on it, creating his own thread (first four posts are his then most of the rest) in which he accuses me of trying to bend the entire world to my will to accomodate my handicap.

http://www.jaguarpc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14107

I don't know if it's a funny read if you aren't the target of these bizarre ruminations, but it made my day!

The crazy thing is, when I googled for the original thread (cause I can't find it otherwise), this actually was tops in the results. It's always a pleasure to know that one is making enemies!

blindpete

cool link! Yeah, I'm so used to adapting I kinda felt guilty when there was a rapid responce to my request. Still its always good to spread the word and raise awareness. If I had to be born with a defect... it could have been a lot worse. It truly has very little impact on my daily life. Although the other day my daughter was asking me about the color wheel. I had to say... "Talk to your mom, honey."

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-Pete
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Giles

I only skimmed the thread so I may have missed something.

Can't you just include the original vBulletin template and call it colourblind or something.

Also, Camino is the best browser for osx and it has a tool that allows you to apply stylesheets to specific sites. Let me know if you are interested.