I renewed my driver's license today and was asked to perform a vision test. I had to the usual : read this line of tiny text, which side of your head is the flashing light on, look at the grid of coloured circles and name them off.
Then this evening I was reading an older article on evolt.org about designing for colour blindness.
I then started to ponder the problems faced by users that can see the entire colour spectrum and how they are equally affected by colour schemes that have little variation in highlighted areas or previously visited links.
These are all problems of usability; if the user can't quickly see where their mouse cursor is or if an element is "clickable" then these are issues that should be considered bugs by the designer and fixed. If a user can't see the "Buy This Now" button highlight, will they click? Will a sale be lost? Perhaps, if the feedback does not provide an obvious connection to the action they wish to invoke.
Personally, I hadn't thought much on the subject but the article on evolt is very informative and provides some great links to tools to determine what a website looks like to the portion of the population colour blindness affects. I definitely will be using the tools provided to ensure that any web work that I do in the future is 100% viewable by those with impaired colour vision.
