Microsoft knows about Color Blindness

• Posted by Daniel Flück on March 9th, 2006 filed in Thoughts

…or at least the color palette inside the Microsoft Office tools knows about color blindness. I don’t know on which release they introduced this feature, but all the shown colors on the palette have a tooltip with their colorname and that is just great.

Microsoft color palette for
colorblinds. This is in

german, but it shows what

I mean. By the way: Rot

means simply Red.

I often need to color either a text passage or a table cell. For a colorblind person this already means guessing, trying out, not knowing what you really are doing. Say I really need to have this table cell colored red. How do I know that this is really red? With my red-green color blindness I never can say it for sure. And therefore this little popup names step into the gap and are of great help for me. I don’t have to ask me anymore if I really have chosen the correct color or ask somebody else to give me a helping hand.

Wouldn’t it be great if this little bit of knowledge could be shared among others? Say: all crayons have their color name imprinted, clothes have not only the size but also the color name on the tags and even watercolors have a little cloud hovering above them to show their names. That would be heaven on earth.