However, if a person has a mutation in their red or green cone cells, distinguishing these two colors becomes much more challenging. For people with normally-functioning photoreceptors, red and green provide good contrast. The red/green color combination is classic in science, most commonly used in heatmaps and fluorescence images. This means that what works to make a figure readable by one person may not work for everyone. It’s also important to note that color-blindness is different for every person many possible inherited mutations can change how the eye perceives and interprets different colors. The genetics behind inherited color blindness are quite interesting, but let’s skip to some practical steps for making your figures more readable. This means that potentially one out of 12 males and one out of 200 females who read your paper or walk past your poster can’t easily read your figures with certain color combinations. As many as 8% of males and 0.5% of females have some form of color-blindness, the most common being difficulty in perceiving the difference between the colors red and green. Why you should care about color-blindnessĬolor-blindness affects a large portion of the population. Although there are many important aspects to designing accessible figures, I want to talk specifically about making figures accessible for people with the most common visual disability: color-blindness. Scientists often fail to design figures from the perspective of our readers, particularly readers with disabilities. A sloppy scatter-plot or unconvincing immunofluorescence image can lead others to misinterpret or even mistrust your data. It’s important that people can easily and quickly understand your data. Proper data visualization is critical for presenting your scientific work in an accessible way.
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