!a11y@programming.dev is a community for discussing digital accessibility, sharing techniques and best practices, and talking about accessibility experiences; both good and bad.
Digital accessibility is the practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, digital systems by people with disabilities. This involves designing and developing websites, mobile applications, software, hardware, and other digital platforms in a way that they can be used by individuals with a range of abilities, including those with visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.
Digital accessibility not only benefits those with disabilities but also enhances the overall user experience, making digital content more usable and understandable for all. In many jurisdictions, it's a legal requirement under disability discrimination laws.
Key components of digital accessibility include accessible website design, multimedia with features like captions or transcripts, properly formatted digital documents, and accessible software and apps. It also extends to hardware design.
This looks like it's stealing someone else's work, and got it wrong at the same time.
Original work: https://petervelnl.blogspot.com/2021/11/vision-encoding-language.html
Getting it wrong: Red should be the Chevron as a metaphor for fire, Yellow should be Circle as a metaphor for Sun, Blue should be line as a metaphor for the sky + horizon.
It's more likely that both are derived from ColorADD, but the idea is also simple enough, conceptually, that they all could have thought of it independently.
Getting it wrong: Red should be the Chevron as a metaphor for fire, Yellow should be Circle as a metaphor for Sun, Blue should be line as a metaphor for the sky + horizon.
The problem with requiring that your symbols are metaphors for things is that those things may not relate to the context in which you are using the symbols. At which point it just adds confusion to say that the yellow symbol represents the sun.
Additionally, people are never going to agree on what should represent what, as you yourself demonstrate; the author explicitly rejects that the blue symbol should be the metaphor for sky, yet for you it apparently felt like the best choice:
For blue, there are two obvious choices. The sky and the water. Water makes a more practical choice since the sky is inherently formless, and therefore quite difficult to represent symbolically.
I'm not a 100% sure it does, the choice of symbols looks a bit suspicious but it could be independently invented from ColorAdd idea like the one you linked. Symbolism is hard to standardise, maybe a chevron for blue has another meaning for the author
Edit: or more realistically, they had this problem and decided to solve it with AI and publish their solution for everyone without checking if the solution already existed and was partially copied by AI. That's the feeling I get from the repository at least
Elegant and well-executed, but, and this is probably just my lack of imagination as someone who is not colour blind, I'm having trouble coming up with uses cases, and most of the examples on the site aren't really convincing to me.
Usually when we try to communicate something with colour, it's not the colour itself that matters, but the colour being distinguishable and/or the associations we have with it, which someone who is colour blind may not even have. Like, if you have a big, red emergency stop button, it being red isn't really what matters; it's red because it stands out and because we associate it with danger. Adding a dot isn't going to help with that, so to make it accessible to colour blind people, it needs additional features to make it stand out and instantly convey its purpose.
That said, I did bookmark the site, in case something comes up where it's the colour itself that's important.
In video games, colorblind mode often adds patterns to colors if they are used in, say, a color coded puzzle. These patterns are enough to distinguish between the colors (usually all that's needed tbh) but having a known set of icons could grant accessibility for more unique puzzles, like ones that involve wordplay, mixing paint/lights/drinks/etc.
the genius of simplicity! love it!
