Together with a Python coloration blindness simulator and acceptable coloration schemes

Shade blindness, or extra exactly coloration imaginative and prescient deficiency, impacts as much as 8% of males and 0.5% of girls. The commonest situation is red-green coloration blindness, a congenital dysfunction by which folks lack the receptors for both crimson or inexperienced colours of their retinas. Because of this, they can’t distinguish coloration pairs similar to crimson and inexperienced, cyan and gray, and blue and purple.

It can be crucial for knowledge scientists to think about color-blind customers when selecting coloration palettes for graphs. A big proportion of customers can have some type of coloration imaginative and prescient deficiency, and so they might perceive graphs otherwise than meant. In actual fact, I understood the significance of this when my direct supervisor was unable to learn my line graphs, and it turned out that he had issue distinguishing between crimson and inexperienced.

On this article, I’ll share

• A Python simulator for the most typical types of coloration blindness
• An accessibility take a look at for the default coloration palettes in matplotlib and seaborn
• Creating accessible coloration palettes with ColorBrewer

What does coloration blindness seem like?

Shade imaginative and prescient is made potential by cone cells within the retina. There are three various kinds of cone cells that obtain crimson, inexperienced, and blue mild, respectively. Folks with red-green deficiency lack both the cones that detect crimson mild or the cones that detect inexperienced mild. Lack of each cones, leaving solely the receptor for blue mild, is uncommon, as is lack of the blue-receptive cone and whole achromatopsia, the dearth of all coloration receptors.

For many who can see all colours, it’s troublesome to think about how a graph appears to be like to a colorblind individual. Shade blindness simulators are helpful instruments for checking the accessibility of your graphics. The simulation within the following panel is made with the DaltonLens on-line coloration simulator, utilizing the Brettel algorithm.