Accessibility : Color blindness themes...

[Alan Smith]

We are using blockly in a project where accessibility is very important, so we have an option for the user to select the various color blindness themes (we use the ones available as Blockly plugins)

However, we have some additional block types that don't map cleanly to the existing styles so we need to select a couple of additional colors for them.   Are there recommendations for colors that work well for the different types of colorblindness?  

We can do our own research to select colors that work, but if someone else has done the work, I would love to just use it.

Ideally, I would like for all the themes to have two or three unused styles that could be used.   "custom_block_1, custom_block_2, custom_block_3" for example.

As a second question, are there icons that are standard for the color blindness themes to show in menus surrounding blockly?

Thanks in advance,

Alan

[Ronald Bourret (xWF)]

One color blindness resource recommended by the documentation is https://mk.bcgsc.ca/colorblind/palettes.mhtml#projecthome.

I'll let somebody else answer your other questions.

Ronald Bourret

Technical Writer (Provided by Synergis)

rbou...@xwf.google.com

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[Alan Smith]

Hmmm.  The colors picked by the Deuteranopia Theme ( https://github.com/google/blockly-samples/blob/master/plugins/theme-deuteranopia/src/index.ts ) aren't on that page.  

But I suspect there was some research behind these and it wasn't just experimentation and then test with a color vision simulator....

--Alan

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[Ben Henning]

Hi Alan,

For your first question, to add a bit to Ron's comment: I don't know the history behind the specific colors picked for the colorblindness plugins, but the colors don't necessarily need to be restricted to the palettes that Ron linked. Those palettes are merely good points of reference, and in fact the bottom of the page explains how to come up with custom colors in a way to ensure colorblind users can correctly differentiate the different steps in colors.

For your second question, are you asking if there are specific icons that can be used to indicate colorblind themes via a menu to help users decide which theme to choose? If so, I'm not aware of there being any standard icons for this purpose (and would welcome anyone else's thoughts on this), but I've seen some videogames do this type of selection in a couple of ways:

• Some will just list the types of colorblindness names (e.g. deuteranopia).
• For more accessibility, others may include in addition to the names (or in substitute for them) 3 or more different color contrast images so that users can select which one they can't see the inner text/image (I think) since that would correspond to a colorblindness (these images usually look just like the ones used in colorblindness tests).

Both certainly have drawbacks: the fist requires the user to know the name, and the second may have false positives on the image if there are other factors affecting contrast (such as monitor display settings or OS-level contrast overrides).

If you're asking something else, could you perhaps provide a bit more context or an example?

Thanks,

Ben

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[Alan Smith]

For the first question, I was wondering if others have already identified colors that go along with those themes.  (so that I could use the values and not do my own research)

For the second, that is exactly what I was asking.   I haven't found any "standards" and have found the same things you have.

Thanks,

Alan

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[feni...@google.com]

> For the first question, I was wondering if others have already identified colors that go along with those themes.  (so that I could use the values and not do my own research)

No, unfortunately, you'll have to do your own research on this one. A five-colour palette that's evenly spaced does not easily accept additional colours without changing the existing ones. For similar reasons, we don't have a set of easy add-on colours.

If you have enough categories that you are seeing confusion with colours, another option is to add icons to blocks in certain categories--similar to what Scratch does with extensions.

Hope this helps,

Rachel

[Alan Smith]

Rachel,

    Thank you.  This does make sense.   I was hoping that perhaps a larger palette was selected and these were a subset, but I can see now that I'll need to select the palette based off of how many different colors I need.  

Thanks,

Alan

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[Maribeth Moffatt]

Mike Harvey from Code.org gave a talk at our 2023 summit about how they chose additional colors for their accessible themes. The talk is available on YouTube here in case it's helpful to you.

Best,

Maribeth

[Max Stephen Russell]

What does he mean in his presentation by “mainline”?

[Maribeth Moffatt]

The preceding talk should have more details, but for years Code.org was using an ancient fork of Blockly, but in 2023 they transitioned to using the currently released version of Blockly instead of a fork. So "mainline" refers to the main Blockly release as opposed to a fork.

[Max Stephen Russell]

Thank you, Maribeth. That is what it sounded like to me.

-Steve