colored text lost on the colorblind

Posted Nov 11, 2021 23:42 UTC (Thu) by klindsay (subscriber, #7459)
Parent article: Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs

I am colorblind and have learned from decades of experience that my perception of colors is not reliable, and I also don't reliably know when I'm misperceiving color. As a consequence, I tend to mentally de-emphasize color when I'm looking at something. So while the color differences described here might jump out at non-colorblind readers, I just don't notice it. To me, it's just visual noise that I mostly ignore. I doubt that I'm the only colorblind person for which this is the case. Linking security features only to color perception is bound to lead to misses for segment of the population.

colored text lost on the colorblind

Posted Nov 12, 2021 2:52 UTC (Fri) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link] (2 responses)

The second (and seemingly accepted?) example uses a wavy underline, not (just) colour, perhaps for this very reason? Or am I misunderstanding something?

colored text lost on the colorblind

Posted Nov 12, 2021 4:24 UTC (Fri) by klindsay (subscriber, #7459) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks jkingweb for pointing out the underline. I was so focused on trying to figure out what had changed with the colors that I hadn't noticed it, or made the connection that the underline is what the article is referring to as highlighting.

colored text lost on the colorblind

Posted Nov 12, 2021 8:37 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

It's also worth noting, of course, that this is Emacs, so the presentation of the warnings can be infinitely customized. If you want them bold, in a 30pt font, reverse video, you can have that...