Accessibility is deeply engrained into the exhibit design community, typically focused on visitors with trouble seeing or moving. But the situation is nuanced and counter-intuitive. For example, most visually-impaired visitors can’t read braille. And blindness is just one among many disabilities. Which ones do we plan for? Which do we leave out?
One universally-overlooked disability is colorblindness, even though it may be more common than any other: it may affect up to 10% of the population (mostly men). [Note: you can simulate what different hues look like with different types of colorblindness at Color Scheme Designer.]
Enter a new proposal from Portugal, Color Add, a concept for a system to tag color fields with monochromatic symbols for the colorblind. More after the break. From the site:
Color blindness is the common denomination to a congenital alteration related to the incapability to distinguish several colors of the spectrum due to a visual deficiency. There are several types of colorblindness. The rarest of which is Monochromacy, which affects the perception of every color, resulting in a black and white or grey shaded vision. The most common type of color blindness is Trichromacy which results in skewed interpretation of different shades of color. While a person with a normal vision may see up to 30.000 colors, a colorblind has his visual capability limited to 500 to 800 colors.
This concept might eventually work for situations where colors are used as markers or simple symbols (hospital wristbands, parking garage levels). But making the complex colors in paintings, map, and technical illustrations accessible to the colorblind is likely far off.
