In our age of modern technologies, when color TVs, computers and other new products are firmly occupying their place in everyday life, it is easy to accounterably to range. The author of the article will tell about the problems of perception of dalconics of modern digital technologies.
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In fact, the traffic light is still a trifle compared to the problems that occasionally arise in everyday life when a collision with the design designed is clearly excluding potential distance perception. A few years ago I had a chance to cooperate with the youth computer magazine, the designer of which somehow loved to post a pink text on a blue background or red on a brown. However, the vision of a dong-blood pink text on a blue background is perceived as an empty sheet, evenly painted in a grayish blue color. Fortunately for readers, this disgrace did not last too long.
The second example. In Krasnoyarsk there is a very advanced film complex, which is advertised as one of the best in Russia. Maybe. But for the Daltonian, buying a ticket at the box office of this institution creates a fair problem. Just a small nuance: gradations of the cost of places on the LCD monitor, which notifies the client about the availability of tickets for a session, indistinguishable and merge on the color with the designation of employed places. Submit to the box office, you call the movie and session, the cashier displays the scheme of the hall and offers: «Choose places». But how? They are visually all the same. Okay, I, a person quite consisted and not shy of such problems, but what adolescents or people with painful modesty are experiencing, scary to think. Will they want to go to this cinema again - a big question.
Strictly speaking, the cinema is not to blame. He uses a ready-made software product. Of course, the administration of a separate cinema could contact the author of the program and demand to change the color interface solution. But the development of a serious product involves beta testing, including interface convenience check. Really no one from the testers even in the head came that the interface is with the withdrawal?
Third example. Localized computer keypads. I do not know which motives encourage designers to make Russian letters that are red. On the black keys they are almost not visible! Choosing a new keyboard, I rejects somewhat excellent other options only because of the color of Cyrillic characters. With considerable difficulty, I managed to find a high-quality keyboard, which is the letters of Latin and Cyrillic equally white. Fortunately, recently, the processes have concerned (or the fashion so successfully coincided), but the bilingual keyboards began to do without red on black. Now alternative characters in most cases white or colored with the additive of blue. Thanks!
The problem of the perception of the color solutions of the program interface or the design of the product is not so harmless, as it may seem, but only the psychological aspect of perception is most often discussed. Meanwhile, if you turn to medical statistics, about 8% of men and 0.5-1% of women around the world suffer from daltonism in one form or another. It would seem that this group is small. But ask any marketer, is it permissible to neglect eight percent of the market? And not just neglected, but to form a negative impression of your product? I think the answer is obvious - it is impossible, and serious developers understand that. Visual example - color solutions MS Windows operating system interface and MS Office applications. What color component by default prevails in the standard design of Windows, starting from the very first versions? Blue. Now guess what color are almost all the ranges? Right, too blue. For most users with limited color, the installation of Windows is comfortable at the installation stage. Posted by this and thought: not a dalonik lee Bill Gates?
Knowing the foundations of physics and approximately understanding the device of a digital camera, the essence of daltonism will even understand a schoolboy. As you know, any color can be represented in the form of a combination of three basic colors: red, green and blue (RGB palette). Conversely, you can get comprehensive information about color, knowing only the ratio between the three components RGB. In the photo and video engineering, three independent sensitive matrices equipped with light filters are used for this. The human eye is more elegant, there are no separate light filters. The role of sensitive elements is played by special retina cells: three types of colums and sticks. They are scattered on the retina evenly like a mosaic. Sticks are responsible for sight with weak lighting, without color distinction. therefore «At night, all sulfur cats». For the perception of color, colums containing photosensitive pigment. If one of the pigments is present in insufficient quantity, the perception of the corresponding color component turns out to be weakened. The most frequently occurred relaxing perception of red. Some less often - green and red, and quite rarely - blue. Finally, there are extreme cases when the color vision is completely absent, and the person sees the world as a black and white photo.
Here is a simple, but spectacular example: Daltonian with reduced red / green perception sets white balance in color TV. It is logical to assume that for a rankonic «White» will not be at all like a person with normal vision. But no, white balance he sets up correctly! The fact is that he knows how white snow looks, white sheet of paper, white chalk… The brain subconsciously and forever fixes the ratio of signals from the colums for the concept «White color». Probably, the brightness of the sticks are involved, for an ordinary person, the day is useless. Similarly, the brain learns to see the red blood and a red light signal, green grass and a green grasshopper who sits in it. As a rule, they see not quite as good vision. But are seen at least somehow different at acceptable for everyday life level. But the possibilities of the brain are not limitless, and compensation has its limit. Sometimes it is physically impossible, such as, for example, when viewing polychromatic drawings that serve to verify vision and, in particular, for the diagnosis of daltonism. Drawings are composed of a set of stains of different color, but the same brightness. This information is not enough for subconscious compensation, retinal sticks cannot be involved, and a dalonian sees a chaotic set of points.
But when a corporate website, an application window, or a log page, turn into a test for checking the color, and the magazine page, becomes sad. Packing the bridge between the perception of a dalconic and a person with a full color-point help special utilities and plugins to graphics packages. They are a bit, and almost everything is created by overseas developers. The only thing I managed to find on the Internet of domestic, so these are daltonism tests in the form of traditional polychromatic tables. But these signs are in any district polyclinic. Justice for the sake of note that many designers truly professional, necessarily check the results of their work on the perception of dalconics. But our compatriots-programmers are not helpers. Probably affects the incomplete in the genome. We were always ashamed not only to confess our own little physical disadvantage, but also to offer help in need. It's easier to pretend that there are no problems. On the other hand, if the problem does not say, from where the programmer knows about the existing need?
I will try to explain what you really need. There is a real need for plugins that allow the designer to see the designed site «Eyes Daltonika». Need a utility that automatically analyzes the color scheme of the interface, logo, drawing and warn the author about the presence of colors, in the perception of which is possible «failure», and / or unpleasant combinations of colors and will indicate their location. You can develop a color corrector that works in the background and temporarily displacing the color profile or replacing individual colors on the display screen, if the rankton is difficult to consider some image or read the text on the site with an unsuccessful design. A similar color correction, only in the opposite direction, will help most rangetones working with a graphic editor, create more adequate images (although full compensation is impossible).
Example: If you take a photo of the cell made by an electron microscope, the Daltonian scientist is physically able to distinguish between the individual components of the cellular structure in the image. In practice, this means the professional unsuitability of a scientist due to physiological restrictions, regardless of the level of intelligence and education. Sadly, it's not true? However, by exposing an image of minor processing, it can be done quite readable for a don. Here you need to take into account that in electron microscopy, tomography and many other areas of science and technology, where used «Synthetic» Visualization, the absolute value of the color is not so important, since the relationship between the measured value and the color indicating it is very conditional.
Attempts to compensate for daltonism with the help of painted contact lenses or glasses with painted glasses, success was not crowned, as they give only the simplest coloring of the image, excluding the psychophysiology of color perception. In addition, for a pronounced effect of improving perception, it is necessary to turn the color to another, lying in another spectral zone (for example, pink in blue), which is impossible to do with the help of a light filter. The use of painted light filters for people with limited perception of red / green in most cases gives an unpredictable result, from the lack of useful effect and up to nausea and headaches.
The achievements of electronics allow you to now create corrective glasses with miniature video cameras, computer processing and an output to LCD-eyewayers. At first, such a device will be quite cumbersome, but also cell phones have recently been a little less bricks. In any case, there is a promising direction for the development of technology, it is in demand and is unlikely to be abandoned. Wait and see. In colour.
