The driver has been permitted to work on the London Underground Jubilee line because it no longer has red and green signals and uses automatic trains.

He is the first of four colorblind candidates to be approved for driving after Transport for London began reviewing its vision standards to take account of advances in technology on the Underground.

Alex discovered he struggled to differentiate between shades of red and green after applying for promotion to a Tube driver in 2016. He had started work as a customer services assistant but wanted to achieve his dream of being a driver.

Read more on msn.com

The post Colour blind man permitted to drive London Underground Tube trains appeared first on We are Colorblind.

The pilot is thought to have been colour-blind, and his licence restricted him to flying in daytime hours only. An aviation source told BBC Wales that the ability to be able to differentiate between green and red lights is “key” to flying in the dark.

The pilot of the plane which crashed into the English Channel with Emiliano Sala on board, was not qualified to fly at night, BBC Wales understands. David Ibbotson is thought to have been colour-blind, and his licence restricted him to flying in daytime hours only.

Footballer Emiliano Sala, 28, died when the plane carrying him from Nantes to Cardiff crashed late on 21 January.

Read the full article on bbc.com/news/uk-wales-47749265

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“In a profession permeated by pigment, best-selling illustrator Loren Long doesn’t let being colorblind stop him from following his dream. Long has found success illustrating children’s books by the likes of Madonna and President Barack Obama.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hiuUD0LJUI

In the segment, Loren talks about his color blindness, his work as an illustrator and the tricks he uses in his profession.

Loren was 14 when he and his mother got the diagnosis. The optometrist told him that his color blindness would not be an issue for him, unless he wanted to be an electrician, a dermatologist, or an artist.

In the car back home, Loren started to cry. But his mother told him: “Loren, your art is beautiful. Don’t let anybody ever tell you you can’t be an artist.”

In the video, Loren talks about how his wife helps him a lot to get the specific colors of his illustrations right. He also labels and organises his colors in a specific order.

The post Illustrator With Color Blindness Loren Long interviewed on the Today Show appeared first on We are Colorblind.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m the programmer (and sometimes game designer, artist and musician) for Alien Bug Games. We’re not a proper full-time development house but rather an imprint that I use to release my hobbyist stuff, and I often collaborate with other designers, artists, and musicians.

We recently released Cartesia for Android phones and tablets. It’s a four play board game of luck and strategy. Each player is represented by three pieces of the same color and take turns rolling dice to move to the center of the board.

Why did you decide to include a color blindness mode in your game?

Back in 2005 I participated in a video game contest where the object was to spend a week creating a game that only used one button.

This was prior to the advent of smart phones and the ubiquity of one-touch mobile games. The contest was co-sponsored by Oneswitch which is a non-profit that promotes input accessibility for people with physical disabilities.

My team ended up creating an autorunner (pre Canabalt!) and tied for first place. I had released some small things on BBSs before but I think this was the first thing I put on the web proper. The founder of Oneswitch wrote me that his daughter really enjoyed our game. It was really validating to know that my art was able touch someone so far away and bring some joy into their life.

It was the combination of those two things that really cemented accessibility in my mind: knowing that I could reach people, and the awareness that Oneswitch gave me. Ever since that experience I’ve tried to keep accessibility in mind while designing things, and since Cartesia relies so heavily on color, I wanted to build in a colorblind accessibility mode so everyone could be included.

Games are ultimately about bringing people together in the spirit of play, and being as inclusive as possible ties right into that.

How did you go about creating the color blindness mode?

I did some research and found the colorblind episode of Mark Brown’s excellent Game Maker’s Toolkit series. That inspired me to distinguish the players’ colors with symbols. I experimented with a few different sets of symbols such as simple geometric shapes like circles, squares, and triangles.

I considered supporting multiple color schemes but couldn’t land on anything that really seemed to work. I was mainly concerned about the game functioning properly for each specific type of color blindness. I considered different levels of grey but that just seemed boring.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m the CEO of Cloudburst, the app development company that created the escape-room game, Castle Breakout. It was created as a medieval-style puzzle mainly for adults – allowing us to add the perfect balance of fun and sophistication.

The vast majority of gamer studios focus on kids or teens, which can be a limiting factor when aiming to engage and intrigue. With that said, focusing on casual adults meant condensing experiences in the game to 5-minute bouts in order to accommodate a busier lifestyle, and shorter attention commitments.

Why did you decide to include a color blindness mode in your game?

As it happens, having dedicated so much time and hard work relying on my eyes in order to guide art on a computer screen, my vision was affected, and on came the glasses along. Just then, something finally dawned on me – the experience of living life, continuing to dig for intriguing experiences with limited eyesight.

The realization immediately expanded into a general sense of empathy and obligation to those that have challenges with their vision. We then recently redesigned our entire approach at Cloudburst to accommodate those with specific visual needs by doing things like making all of our text, and icons larger – sometimes by about 30% larger.

On Inclusive design

CEO of InVision Clark Valberg calls it our collective responsibility to design inclusively:

“We spend an average of ten hours per day in front of a screen of some kind, making us beholden to the designers behind those screens. As a result, those designers are now responsible for building products that take into consideration the needs, experiences, and preferences of the widest possible group of people.
They have a responsibility to challenge the assumption that there is an ‘average’ user, or that audiences fit neatly into a set of personas. They have a responsibility to understand and design for the needs of individuals with varying cognitive and physical abilities.”

Clark Valberg, CEO of InVision

We are in great company

Together with We are Colorblind, InVision supports three other initiatives who focus – each in their own way – on inclusive design. They are all very inspiring projects that we love to share with you:

Mismatch.design is an online community and digital magazine dedicated to advancing inclusive design. The site is a free source of insights, personal stories, and best practices that help design practitioners think and design more inclusively. Mismatch.design was founded by Kat Holmes, author of the book “Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design” and one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business.

The A11Y Project is an open-source, community-driven effort to make web accessibility easier. Run by a small group of volunteers who are passionate about making the web easier to use for everyone, The A11Y Project’s site contains tips and how-tos on site accessibility, accessibility-related tests, and a curated list of upcoming events and resources on web accessibility. Here you’ll their A11Y Style Guide.

Visionary is the world’s first Internet browser specifically designed for the 3% of the population who suffer from some kind of visual impairment. Created by Gabriela Fonseca and Greg Palmieri, Visionary was inspired by struggles faced by Gabriela’s mother who suffers from Retinitis Pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease causing severe vision loss over time.

The grant

The Design forward fund by InVision is dedicated to investing in the future of design. Doing this by offering $5 million in grants and equity investments to people and companies who are creating tools and resources that change the game for designers and their teams.

With the support of this grant we will be able to keep on posting freely available articles, resources and examples on this platform. We are very excited to be able to keep on expanding our content on color blindness and designing inclusively.

Do you have ideas on topics still missing or want to suggest a product or website we could review as an example? Please do contact us. Lets work together on making the world a better place for the colorblind!

The post We are Colorblind receives Design Forward Fund by InVision appeared first on We are Colorblind.

The app contains a food guide detailing the FODMAP content for different types of foods. The diet works by restricting foods that contain certain carbohydrates. The app lists these carbohydrates for each type of food and tells you if it’s OK to eat or to avoid that type of food.

In the app, next to each item listed is a red, yellow, or green icon indicating if the item is a High FODMAP food (red), has moderate amounts of FODMAPs (yellow), or is a Low FODMAP food (green).

This way you can get a quick indication of what category a food is in. Each item of food also lists specifically what kind of FODMAPs that food is high in.

The red, yellow, and green are difficult to distinguish for the colorblind. Especially the red and green look almost identical for the most common types of color blindness.

Luckily, a ‘Color Blindness Assistance’ option is available. The setting replaces the red, yellow, and green icons with color blindness friendly versions.

The High FODMAP food (red) changes into a cross, the yellow for moderate amounts of FODMAPs changes into an exclamation mark, and the green Low FODMAP foods now show a checkmark.

The A11Y style guide comes with pre-populated accessible components that include helpful links to related tools, articles, and WCAG guidelines to make your site more inclusive.
These components also serve as a guide for both HTML markup and SCSS/CSS code, to inform designers, front-end and back-end developers at every stage of the website’s creation.

You can use the Style Guide as a reference, as a base for your own style guide or for creating your own accessible components.

You can find the Style Guide here: https://a11y-style-guide.com/style-guide/

The post A11Y Style Guide appeared first on We are Colorblind.

Funkify features a cognition simulator, a dyslexia simulator, a motor simulator, a vision simulator and more.

Download Funkify from the Chrome web store

The post Funkify Disability Simulator appeared first on We are Colorblind.