aPrivett's avatar
aPrivett
Occasional Contributor
8 years ago
Status:
New Idea

Testing with the color blind user in mind

I want an option in Playback to detect possible issues for the color blind user so that the 8% of the population who is colorblind can use our desktop applications more effectively.

 

I'm a tester and I'm red/green color blind, so it takes a lot of inquisition to the developer on something that's weird, which often ends up with something like, WOW, CAN'T YOU SEE THAT IT'S PURPLE??$%&?  Another victory for testing if I catch it, even though someone shouted or tried to make fun of me.

 

Most of the time, people just forget that someone is color blind.  Even after 30 years, my wife still forgets. This week, she colored her hair and laughed that I didn't notice. It just goes on and on.

 

I have also submitted this to the community, where I asked for 3rd party solutions. and the community suggested that I create an Idea if I wanted to pursue.  I would be willing to be a beta tester if you all wanted to try something.

  • aPrivett's avatar
    aPrivett
    Occasional Contributor
    8 years ago

    I appreciated this Response from Robert Martin:

     

    "As it is, from what I understand of color-blindness is that there are varying degrees and "types".  For example, my brother in law is green-blue colorblind.  He can see and distinguish all other colors but green and blue he is unable to differentiate. Common among men who are color-blind is red-green. 

     

    So, for such a feature to be feasible/practical, some sort of standardized criteria would need to be created and checked against.  I'm guessing that would have to be color "ranges" either with rgb numeric values or something like the hexadecimal values in CSS stylesheets.  Since most websites use stylesheets any more, I think that would be your best place to start, to write some sort of code that, after a page is loaded, check the CSS stylesheet to see if there are any text colors within a given range sitting on a background of another given range.  

     

    I'm not familiar with any specific third party tools but a quick google search found a bunch that are usable for manual testing including some chrome extensions.  I didn't find anything for incorporating into an automated scenario, though."

     
    Robert Martin