Have you ever thought about this at all? If you or someone close to you isn’t color blind, chances are you have never thought to put your web site through a color blind test. I’ll admit it has never crossed my mind until today.

If you want to check your site there are two cool tools you can use. Warning the images and styles may not look all that pretty and your goals my be different from mine. For me, the top concern is with readability of content and links and am satisfied with the results.

• Color Blind Web Page Filter
• Vischeck

Here’s what our home page looks like.

I’ve noticed the reds what most of us are so fond of to highlight important headlines and all that don’t fare too well. At this point I’m not sure if it warrants any major re-design but something to maybe limit perhaps. The blues turn out well though which is another reason why not to mess with blue links unless there’s real good reason – e.g. links you have to have on the site but don’t really want anyone to click on. I’m also somewhat relieved our logo managed to stay largely intact. Probably has to do with the blues to which I am partial to.

Oh yes another biggie. When I was working with the ad agency, one of the things that was always drummed into our head is black text on white background reads the best. Sure you see crazy creatives flying about and some look really good – that’s because some of these ad guys are quite the pros. But for web pages – that should be key. With one exception, I don’t generally build dark web sites. If I do, I make sure the text area is always light or white so the black text is readable. Reading on the computer screen is hard enough work folks. Don’t make your readers struggle even harder because guess what will happen? – Click – that’s right they are gone, gone, gone.

Anyhow, I hope these color blind test tools will help you when you have your web site design created, updated or re-evaluated. More resources:

• How to design web accessible pages for the color blind
• If you are looking for more info about web site usability, the book “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug comes highly recommended. Yes that is an affiliate link.

Thanks to Stefanie Fish and Tarzanna for bringing this up to my attention.