Color blindness (original) (raw)

Nature Methods volume 7, page 775 (2010)Cite this article

Subjects

To the Editor:

As Bang Wong notes in his recent column on proper color coding in figures, just picking suitable colors is not always sufficient1. In particular, one important, but often neglected, issue is color blindness because it affects a substantial portion of the human population (additional information is available at MedlinePlus: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/colorblindness.html). One well-known example of frequent color vision defects is red-green deficiency, which occurs, in case of Northern European ancestry, in about 8 percent of males and 0.5 percent of females2. Therefore, it is advisable to select figure colors accordingly, and journals might introduce color guidelines to increase the authors' awareness of this accessibility issue. For instance, software such as Adobe Photoshop offers color blindness proofing filters that simulate what an image will look like to individuals with color blindness. Authors can then adjust the image to make it universally accessible (see Adobe Photoshop CS5 accessibility overview at http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/photoshop/overview.html).

References

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Campus E1.4, Saarbrücken, Germany
    Mario Albrecht

Authors

  1. Mario Albrecht
    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence toMario Albrecht.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The author declares no competing financial interests.

Rights and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Albrecht, M. Color blindness.Nat Methods 7, 775 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth1010-775a

Download citation

This article is cited by

Nature Methods (2010)