Accessibility: Switch On Github's ColorBlind Themes

As Github sits at the foundation of software development, they have a unique role in empowering people with disabilities in digital futures.

As such, I was happy to see that light and dark colorblind accessible themes are available to all github.com users in a public beta.

These themes swap colors such as red and green for orange and blue to make GitHub more inclusive for colorblind users.

Users can update their theme preferences under the the “Appearance” page in their Github profile settings.

In the last year Github has worked on enhancing additional accessibility experiences in features such as issues, pull requests, and discussion.

GitHub's Accessibility Commitment outlines their journey to help bridge the Disability Divide, stating: "we want every developer to feel welcome in our community and be empowered to contribute to the future of global software development with everything GitHub has to offer."

Notable updates include improving the color contrast of the default light and dark themes, increased link accessibility with the option to underline links within text blocks and enhanced their comment boxes to accommodate keyboard and screen reader users.

Awesome work...but let's explore this concept more..

To start, what is Color blindness?

Color blindness—also known as color vision deficiency (CVD)—is a deficiency in distinguishing between different colors. It occurs when light-sensitive tissue in the back of the eye—the retina–fails to properly respond to variations in wavelengths of light, which enable people to see different colors. Damage to the retina caused by aging can also cause color blindness.

Github has taken note of the fact that there are several well-established color cues which designers use to convey information.

Color plays a significant role in data visualization. For starters, colors are used to highlight important information, as well as illustrate relationships between various types of data. Color also plays an instrumental role in guiding the viewer’s eye and can be used to stimulate emotion.

As such, when designing forms and other site cues, it is common to associate green with success and red with errors.

However, relying only on color can be problematic for users with color blindness.

This problem commonly presents itself with forms, charts and site color contrast.

In order to simulate color blindness when designing your site, UX designers can benefit from utilizing the below tools:

Helpful Online Tools for UX:

Venngage Accessible Color Palette Generator: Helps designers generate a pre-planned accessible color scheme.

Coblis by Colblindor: Designed to simulate how an image looks like with certain types of color vision deficiency.

NoCoffee Vision Simulator: Chrome extensions that provides a helpful tool for understanding the problems faced by people with slight to extreme vision problems including color blindness.

As always, if you see anything I've missed or have suggestions to add, feel free to drop me a line or let me know in the comments. Happy learning!

-Mary

Sources:

-Github Blog / Changelog / Accessibility Guide

-Crux Collaborative

-Venngage Accessible Color Palette Generator