Another type of vision issue that occurs when people get older is that their color vision declines. It becomes harder to distinguish colors that are similar and the color blue becomes faded.
It’s not a good idea, therefore, to use the color blue as a code, and even worse to use blue and similar colors to give meaning. For example, if you showed a map with different colors to delineate the spread of the flu virus—where blue means widespread reporting of flu, blue/green means medium-level reports, and so on—older people might find it hard to distinguish the colors.
Takeaways
- Avoid using the color blue as a means of providing information.
- When you’re showing areas of color to give meaning, use colors that are very different from each other.
- Make sure you have lots of contrast between the foreground (for example, the text) and the background.
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