In perusing this week's assigned websites, I especially enjoyed browsing the archives of webpagesthatsuck.com, a site whose wall of shame is likely to provide ample instruction (and winces) throughout this course. Among the sites they call out is relogik.com, which is rightly mocked for its use of nigh-illegible medium gray text on a light gray background. I followed a few of the links on their send-up of Relogik and arrived at a discussion of contrast on web pages, which in turn led me to a set of tools for developing pages that work for color-blind users.
It was at this point that I had my first oh-no moment of the course. The color-blindness simulation tools were undoubtedly well adapted for their intended purpose -- that is, showing designers without any color deficiency what their color scheme will look like to a color-blind person. Unfortunately, the tools weren't so useful to me, as I am protanomalous (or "red-weak") myself! So already, in the first week of the course, I've made a mental note that if I design color schemes that use a lot of reds, I ought to run them past someone with normal color vision. I've rarely had trouble using a website because of my protanomaly, but I've often played video games whose shades of red and green looked too similar for me to distinguish, and I wouldn't want to inflict an analogous experience on my hapless majority of users who are color-normal!
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