Paul Fenwick talks about color blindness and not using color alone

Paul points out that he doesn't have barriers all the time with the use of color alone, particularly red and green, but when he has a blocker, it's a doozy. Transcript Nic Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout. And you're listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairment, and what barriers they encounter on the web. Today I'm talking with Paul Fenwick. Hey, Paul, how are you? Paul Hi, I am doing pretty well today. How are you doing, Nic? Nic I'm doing good. Very happy to talk to you. We've bumped into each other, I think in New Zealand, in Australia in the States, but it's been several years since we have had a chance to speak properly. Paul It has back in the before times. Nic The before times. That's right. Let me ask you the first question I ask all my guests What's your disability or your impairment? Paul So the one that we'll be talking about today is colorblindness, I have good old garden variety red green colorblindness, which means that I can still see colors just not as well as somebody without colorblindness. Nic When you say you have red green colorblindness, does that mean that red and green are exactly the same? Or they're brownish? Or they're slightly different twos? What does that mean? Paul So if you look at it from a biological standpoint, the receptors which pick up green and red light in my eyes, there, there's some overlap in the spectrums which they fire from. And what this means is, I still see, when I look at something which is green, I think it's green, when I look at something which is red, it looks like it's red. But if something is low saturation, if it is washed out, if it's a dark lighting, those sorts of situations, I can't necessarily tell and how this manifests is not me saying like, Oh, it's like gray, or it's brown. Human brains are fascinating. So my brain just fills it in with what color logically makes sense there. And we do this all the time. If you are in a dark room, then everyone's color vision is impaired. But we still see all the plant over there is green, even though your eyes are incapable of perceiving green at that point, because it just gets filled in. And this was really interesting when I was a child, because I remember one day I came home from school, my parents had repainted the lounge room. And I'm like, Oh, wow, like what a lovely shade of green, you've painted the lounge room. And they're like, Paul, it's, it's not green. And I'm like, oh, oh, it's it's like, it's like a peach color that's really lovely like that matches the furniture, like pullets, it's not peach, and I'm like, Well, what color is it then. And they had painted the room gray. And in my mind, my parents would never paint the room Gray, that would just be a little bit too boring. So I immediately filled it in with a color which made sense with the rest of the furniture and the rest of the house. And so that was sort of a bit of a moment for me relaxed, realizing that, wow, I really do have colorblindness because as a child, I would deny it a lot. And at this point, it was like, Oh, wow, that is actually a thing. Nic So I assume you're not a child anymore. You've made these realizations, you've probably developed some coping strategies. But we're here talking about barriers you encounter on the web. So what kind of barriers you encounter directly related to color blindness. Paul So the number one... the number one thing which I hit all the time, with my color blindness, there are different types of colorblindness is specifically using red and green to convey information when there is no other channel. Alongside that to convey the same information. And unfortunately, that is extremely common, that we will use green to indicate something's good red to indicate something as bad. If there's an orange in there as well, that just makes it even worse, because that's an intermediate color betwee