Colour Blindness Options

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There are different types of colour blindness (or "color blindness" if you use US English). There are those that cause the person to see everything in monochrome colours (like black and white), the very common red-green colour blindness where the person can't (or finds it hard to) distinguish red and green hues, and the blue-yellow colour blindness where the problem lies with discriminating between blue and yellow hues. Even within each of these broad categories, there are differences in the way they perceive colours.

Do not be deceived and think that Flash Website Design site is immune because it doesn't use (say) red or green. The different types of colour blindness can cause the colours of your site to appear completely different from what you intend. The end result is that your text may be indistinguishable from your background or that different elements of your page may appear merged with the rest of your page. For example, the "buttons" on your side panel may appear to have the same colour as the rest of your page, so that the colour-blind person reading may not realise that those are buttons.

Here are some practical suggestions for designing your website so that people with colour blindness can still use the site:

As far as possible, do not make your site dependent on colours. For example, if the only way to distinguish a link from normal text on your site is by its colour, and you're not careful when choosing your colours, it's entirely possible that a colour-blind person will not be able to see any links on your site. For your main content, it's generally best not to remove the underlining from your links.

Where you have important information, try to use black text on a white background, like what you see on the main article portion of thesitewizard.com and thefreecountry.com. Such a colour scheme is readable by anyone, colour-blind or not.