Red/green color choices not colorblind friendly

[jeffposnick]

The Problem

The "Ready to Merge" and "Requires Attention" colors are hard to distinguish for users with the type of colorblindness that I have.

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/94696/color-palette-for-all-types-of-color-blindness

Expected Behavior

Use a red/green pair with more contrast, or an alternative color pair, or a visual cue like bold/italtics to distinguish the two states.

[samuelli]

Sorry about that. Do you feel this impacts the UX?

I went through a few iterations of the design and have pretty much removed color as a necessary indicator in the UI. The text is designed to be fully sufficient without color. "Ready to merge" used to be orange like the rest before it was requested in #316.

These legends also provide filtering behavior so I expect this would also assist in filtering the list by category.

[jeffposnick]

It's hard to say how much it impacts the UX, as I'm not sure what context I'm missing out on.

I can just rely on reading the textual descriptions, and if there isn't any additional context that can be derived from the colors, then I guess I'm not missing out on anything.

(But then why have the different colors to begin with?)

[merlinnot]

It actually has a value, since the colours are reflected in actions for the entities:

• No reviewers assigned -> requires attention
• Changes requested -> new activity

Maybe we could use some emojis? 😄 Something like:

• Ready to merge: ✔️
• Requires attention:❗️
• New activity: 🔥

Developers usually like emojis and they're so lightweight.

[cdata]

I agree, the color has meaning and it would actually be more confusing if I could not distinguish red/green. This isn't meant to be a simulation of color blindness, but if I saw a legend that looked like this:

I would be pretty confused.

[samuelli]

@cdata per the link in the issue, I think its more like 13/14:

So I think the issue is more when you're scanning the list it hard to tell which one it is, not that the legend doubles up per se.

[cdata]

Certainly, although this comment caught my attention: "The text is designed to be fully sufficient without color." If that's true, then I should be able to desaturate the page and still be able to pick out different categories of content based on the legend.

On a related note: I had no idea that I could filter by clicking on the legend items until you mentioned it in that same comment ;)