Caution: Many people are color blind

An item in the "Clicked" blog at MSNBC references an article that says 1 in 12 people have some sort of color blindness. That's a much higher percentage than web developers usually think. In fact, I discovered that I have a slight blue-green color blindness.

The impact? Web developers need to take action:

• get some facts about the different types of color blindness
• follow accessibility techniques to make your pages easier to view by more people. For example, avoid using the colors red or green for anything important -- red-green color blind people see them as sort of shades of gray. In fact, that's why I edited the default template for this blog to change the dateline and "Links" area text from shades of green to shades of blue.
• check out sites that show you differences for various color-blind conditions.

An example cited in the MSNBC article is an MSNBC page that showed small photos, which "brightened" when you hover your mouse over them. The problem was that they weren't easily to tell apart for some people. And (originally) a red border was added to the photo.

Recent research shows that we all have differently "wired" retinas.