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Comment by neilpanchal | Hacker News Reader

I built similar perceptually uniform color library: https://github.com/neilpanchal/Chroma

The sad part is that we have all these colors available in the physical world but representing in sRGB (or even Adobe RGB or DCI P3) space takes away all the fun. We have a narrow space to work within and it poses limits to what you can do. Vast majority of monitors in the world are barely capable of representing sRGB space, and even if they are, calibration is another issue. You can employ all kinds of science in representing proper colors but if the end user's calibration is not good, all bets are off.

Colors are a problem for interface design (and accessibility), it becomes a real challenge when dealing with quantitative data and build perceptually uniform colormaps with accessibility considerations, here is an amazing presentation of Matplotlib's new colormaps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU

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depending on how you look at it, this is either a really interesting or really frustrating problem. the limitations of screen technology and the way we perceive colors puts a lot of awkward constraints on how we can represent and transform them. I like to show people this page as a primer on why color is more complicated than they might think: http://www.hsluv.org/comparison/

the answer to the question "what is the best color space?" can only be "for what?".

I also built something that tangles with color, contrast and accessibility: http://strapless.io

I think the fun comes in working around the challenges you mentioned. The standards are sometimes lacking design-wise in what's allowed but they're pretty good at ensuring readability across devices.

I've been messing around with the Turbo colormap, another new one that seems really useful for UI design, and solving these problems in particular: https://rexriepe.github.io/tpcs/

> build perceptually uniform colormaps with accessibility considerations

That is impossible, color-blind people wont see them as perceptually uniform since the area with the color they can't see gets a lot darker. For example I can't see red text on a certain kinds of black background, as in I don't even recognize that there are letters there. I remember being on a presentation where the author apparently liked to play with colors, and several of the screens were just blank to me I didn't even know that I there were letters there I couldn't see.

I'm pretty sure this only affects protan(omaly/opia). The green and red cones along with the rods all play a roll in determining the brightness of any colour. When the red cone is shifted towards green, then all wavelengths to the right of that will be darkened. I thought tritanopia would experience this too since the blue cone is also an edge-of-the-rainbow cone, but apparently the blue cone plays a very small roll in detecting brightness. Therefore, a bright blue colour would appear to to someone with tritanopia as yellowish white, since it is nearly equally detected by the green & red cones.

Matplotlib's developers talk about it here: https://youtu.be/xAoljeRJ3lU?t=738

> the area with the color they can't see gets a lot darker

Interestingly, for me (deuteranomolous) the colors I can't see often seem lighter. For example, green traffic lights appear white. I assumed this is because I can still see the light, it just doesn't get interpreted as green, but I don't know whether that's true.

Green lights are white to me as well, I guess they have a decent chunk of blue in them and people call them green due to the lack of red. (I see blue + green as white since I don't see red)

But if you see it as white as well then I'd expect your problem to be with the color red and not the color green.

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