Microsoft knows about Color Blindness

…or at least the color palette inside the Microsoft Office tools knows about color blindness. I don’t know on which release they introduced this feature, but all the shown colors on the palette have a tooltip with their colorname and that is just great.

I often need to color either a text passage or a table cell. For a colorblind person this already means guessing, trying out, not knowing what you really are doing. Say I really need to have this table cell colored red. How do I know that this is really red? With my red-green color blindness I never can say it for sure. And therefore this little popup names step into the gap and are of great help for me. I don’t have to ask me anymore if I really have chosen the correct color or ask somebody else to give me a helping hand.

Wouldn’t it be great if this little bit of knowledge could be shared among others? Say: all crayons have their color name imprinted, clothes have not only the size but also the color name on the tags and even watercolors have a little cloud hovering above them to show their names. That would be heaven on earth.

3 responses on “Microsoft knows about Color Blindness

  1. Tom

    As a web developer/designer I work with colour all the time. After several years I have become accustomed to using hex values – like #ff0000 for red – to help me get the right ones.

    Even though I harbour a dislike for all things MS I think they did a very good job of helping out colour-blind people.

  2. Christine Kent

    I have been trying to find anything in Microsoft products or on the website about color blindness and can’t find it. Can you send me some links please.