[The Voice recently profiled Gerry and Anne Chester's Books on WebTV. They have recently been busy with another page on color blindness. Why? Because their eldest son is color blind along with a little over 5% of the white male population. Since Gerry is concerned with illegible sites and e-mails with the "ever increasing use of backgrounds," he was invited to share those concerns with the readers!--ck]
This writer has a personal interest in the subject of color blindness as one of his sons is so afflicted. However, one may ask, "What does it have to do with WebTV?" Prior to giving an answer, some basic information about "Color Blindness" is necessary.
First of all, "Color Blindness" is not blindness. It is the inability, of some people, to not see colors as do others. More aptly, it is termed as having a "Visual Color Deficiency."
While "Color Deficiency" is predominately a male affliction, it is not exclusively so. Estimates as to the number of people with some degree of "Color Deficiency" vary. Worldwide, it is put at some 250 million! In North America, better than 8% of the population are so afflicted.
The percentage of people who can see only blacks and shades of grey is quite small. The majority by far, are unable to distinguish, with varying degrees of severity, between reds and greens. Some, about 1% of the total afflicted, are unable to differentiate between blues and yellows.
While it is hard to determine how many WebTV users suffer from some measure of "Color Deficiency," an estimate in excess of 50,000 would not be too unrealistic.
What does all this have to do with WebTV? By way of an answer, in the header of his site entitled "Colour Blindness," Andrew Oakley succinctly states, "We don't hit Web Pages we can't read!"
A simple example would be the inability of most color blind people to read a page having text in a shade of red with a background in a shade of green, or vice versa.
As a test for "Color Deficiency" and to illustrate how wide are the colors in the red spectrum, go to Mark Henthorne's "Red/Green Color Vision Deficiency".
Anne and I have a page to test on color blindness which can be found here. Additionally, we have a page in progress about color blindness.
Undoubtedly the use of color plays an important role in the creating of Web pages. However, keeping in mind what Andrew Oakley has written, let us endeavour to create Web pages that are viewable by everyone.
[Community Editor's Notes: Gerry! Thank you for sharing this information with the readers. I am sure most of us just had no idea of such difficulties and are now aware to be more careful in our choice of colors.--ck]
