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Points of view: Color blindness

Nature Methods volume 8, page 441 (2011)Cite this article

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Since my first column on color coding1 appeared, we have received a number of e-mails asking us to highlight the issue of color blindness. One of those correspondences was published in the October 2010 issue2. Here I offer guidelines to make graphics accessible to those with color vision deficiencies.

Color blindness affects a substantial portion of the human population. Protanopia and deuteranopia, the two most common forms of inherited color blindness, are red-green color vision defects caused by the absence of red or green retinal photoreceptors, respectively. In individuals of Northern European ancestry, as many as 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women experience the common form of red-green color blindness3. If a submitted manuscript happens to go to three male reviewers of Northern European descent, the chance that at least one will be color blind is 22 percent.

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Figure 1: Ishihara color-vision test plate.
Figure 2: Colors optimized for color-blind individuals.
Figure 3: Red-green color coding in an immunofluorescent image.

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References

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  3. Deeb, S.S. Clin. Genet. 67, 369–377 (2005).

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  1. Bang Wong is the creative director of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Harvard and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.,

    Bang Wong

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Wong, B. Points of view: Color blindness. Nat Methods 8, 441 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1618

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