Colour blindness and iphone đź”—
Jason Snell has written an interesting article on colour blindness:
The design of Apple’s MagSafe chargers are a case in point: They contain a clever design to indicate your charging status at a glance — green means charged, amber means charging, and no light means that there’s no power or connection.
Except, well… I can’t really tell the difference between the green and the amber lights at a glance. For a long time, I didn’t even realize the light on the MagSafe connector changed color. (Apple is far from alone here — lots of electronics use subtle color shifts of an LED to indicate things in a way that I simply can’t digest.)
But I do love that Apple are trying to make things easier:
In iOS 10, Apple will let users filter their entire display, whether that’s applying grayscale, red/green filters for both protanopia and deuteranopia color blindness, and a blue/yellow filter for a very different form of color blindness called tritanopia. There’s also an option to just overlay a color tint of any hue or intensity.
I had a discussion with someone last week about how developers can, and do, keep disability and individual circumstances in mind. When asked what kind of built in features were built into the iPhone for accessibility, the list in my head was growing as I thought of more and more.
The answer I verbally gave was “gosh, loads!”.
It’s nice that Apple are growing accessibility features for iOS year after year, even though they don’t have to. I like that they see it as their social responsibility to do so.