Syntax Coloring: Is it harder for color-blind coders to program?

If so, how do you (if you guys are around) handle the issue? I just heard a story today about a Japanese smoke alarm for deaf people that uses the smell of wasabe to wake them, so I 开发者_运维知识库got curious.

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If you're really curious, look at

http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/2A.html

Very few colorblind people are monochromatic (totally colorblind). Most colorblindness falls into the category protanopia or deuteranopia, which can see yellows and blues and browns. So syntax coloring can get set to those. Most of them have a hard time seeing light green, which looks orange, etc.

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I am colorblind, red-green deficiencies (protanopes and deutanopes). I have never had any trouble with syntax highlighting, that I have noticed anyway. :)

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Most syntax highlighting is configurable.

Certainly nobody should deliberately make life harder on colorblind people, but they've been managing to work around such issues for their whole lives. I've seen some cut and paste into non-color highlighting text editors. I've also seen that they tend to be more familiar with how to configure color highlighting that most people.

In vi, I use

:syn off

when someone discovers a truly horrid highlighting scheme.

If you want to get a feel for how color schemes might appear to the color blind, http://colorschemedesigner.com/ simulates several different colorblind models of perception.

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I am mildly colorblind, with blue deficiencies. This often means that blue or purple colored text is nearly indistinguishable from black text (it is dark grey).

When I get frustrated, I occasionally use Notepad++, a notepad software that supports syntactical highlighting because it allows for creating custom color schemes for highlighting, which is quite handy. It also has support built in for a myriad of languages already.

As a previous poster noted, more often problems arise in graphic design when trying to match colors. (eyedropper FTW!)

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I am a colorblind female - i have a rare version where i have trouble seeing pastel blues, greens, and reds. You would assume that i see yellows very well, but that is not the case. Pastels wash out to brown and grey, All bold colors typically look like pastel versions of themselves. So my world is mostly browns and greys with pops of color.

Case in point - on this page i see some blue text to the right, black text, some brown boxes, and a stripe of a babysh&# brown color at the top - not very appealing to my eye.

If you are wanting to make accomodations for color deficiency or colorblindness:

I work in IT so when i type i typically use a lot of color or high contrast that confuses other people - but it just serves to slightly highlight things for myself so i don't lose my place

I would appreciate it if programmers enable a high-contrast version, a dark mode, and if they let you choose a blue-yellow syntax as well as green-red.

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The consequence of colour blindness would be different for text on a screen rather than other situations.

That is, someone could tweak the UI to match colours as needed. The implicit meaning of the text is still there: comments are comment, keywords are still keywords etc.

It's not like having to decode a traffic light in a very short time, or being told to "cut the red wire" as a bomb disposal expert

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I'm colorblind (only very mild) and I don't have any trouble at all with this. Generally the default colors in IDEs contrast enough that they are quite clearly different. The thing to remember that in most cases colorblindness is really a lack of sensitivity to color so bold high contract colors often be distinguished.

The biggest problem doing development having colorblindness is when I need to do some work with artwork and images - I just need to be extra careful that colors do actually match (I use photoshop or whatever to confirm).

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Many editors allow you to set properties of the text other than color for syntax highlighting. You could change the weight of the font, underline, italicize, etc. Obviously you won't have nearly as many choices as with using color, but it would allow some differentiation.