Re: Recommendations for AppleScript Formatting
Re: Recommendations for AppleScript Formatting
- Subject: Re: Recommendations for AppleScript Formatting
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 18:33:45 -0400
on 10/24/01 5:30 PM, Arthur J Knapp at email@hidden wrote:
>
Bill, are there colors, (or color combinations), that are acceptably
>
distinct for most color-blindness?
For men like me, just avoid juxtaposing red and green tones, or using them
to represent different meanings. Or, if you must use red and green, make
sure they are of markedly different intensities, or make sure there are
other easily perceived distinguishing features like shape or text. I can't
be more precise than that, partly because there are a number of different
subsets of this sort of colorblindness, each with slightly different
effects. In any event, it's always easier to describe the included set than
to describe everything else.
One odd side effect of being colorblind is that I, at least, have always
been less aware of the names that people commonly associate with various
subtle gradations of color. I guess I couldn't tell them apart, or I
couldn't consistently fix my mind on what color they were describing, or
maybe it's just that I learned to mistrust the words that describe colors
because I was told so many times as a kid that I was painting the sky a
funny color (I gather I was using purple, which looked blue enough to me).
As a result, I find it hard to answer your question in part because I don't
have a full command of the words.
To try to be a little more helpful than that, let me say that blue and
yellow are, to me, as to most people, very contrasting colors. (That, by the
way, is why you used to see so many businessmen wearing blue shirts with
yellow ties. They were colorblind, and they could trust their choice in the
dim light of the morning closet with those colors. Blue shirts with red ties
work pretty well, too.) But I'm told that blue and yellow are a problem for
a small number of women, although I haven't yet met a woman who would own up
to this version of colorblindness. Orange is easy for me to identify. Pink
and purple can be hard for me to distinguish from red and blue,
respectively, perhaps because I see the red components differently -- or
maybe everybody experiences pink and purple as similar. You can see that
this is a dangerous path to travel, because I could lead you to what I would
bet could be some pretty awful color combinations. I had a favorite tie some
years ago, which I thought was very muted and conservative -- until somebody
told me that it had a jarring combination of bright red and green tones.
Maybe the best bet is to just show the colors you plan to use to five of
your men friends. Chances are that one of them could be helpful in telling
you whether they look indistinguishable to him. Or, on my web site there is
a link to a company that sells a Photoshop plug-in that mimics, for people
with full color vision, the experience of a color blind person looking at
the same colors. I tried out on my wife some samples from their web site,
and her reactions tended to confirm that it worked.
Is everybody getting as tired of this subject as I am? I'm not sorry I
started it, because it's an issue worth knowing about, but I am sorry to
have kept it going so long.
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
Quechee Software, Quechee, Vermont, USA
http://www.quecheesoftware.com
The AppleScript Sourcebook -
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