Colour blindness is often one of the many areas of accessibility which is overlooked but as it effects somewhere between 7% and 10% of the adult population it’s certainly something that we should be considering when designing web-pages.
I regularly read Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog and this morning he provided a useful link to an online tool for testing colour blindness.
I certainly wouldn’t suggest going to the extreme lengths of making sure that your site looks identical to those with colour blindness but as a designer, you should always ensure that sufficient contrast is in place so that your users can distinguish between different elements on the page, foreground and background colours and links.
Links that fall inline within a block of text or paragraph can be particularly troublesome if the underline is removed and a colour is used that is similar to the main body text so this test will certainly help in eliminating these easy to fix problems.
And finally, here’s an example of how this very site looks to someone with the protanopia version of colour blindness:
Dave-Woods.co.uk displayed as a protanopia colour blind user would see the site
Hello mate
I am thinking of creating an accessability option to our company website(for color blid people) and i dont have a clue about how to do it…any ideas???