It’s difficult to explain how bad some of the new Rhino V9 icons look due to several reasons:
- Most people are not colour blind, so they think that everything is alright;
- The graphics designer of the Rhino UI is a female, which means she has a better vision than most males (both, colour range and contrast);
- Some colour-blind people are less affected than others. There are a total of 8 different types of colour blindness (3 common types plus 5 rare types), and some people suffer from two types simultaneously. Also, the colour-blidness can get worse as the people get old, but it never improves.
The worst type of colour blindness is a total lack of colour vision, which means those people only see a black and white picture. The second worst type is the Tritanopia, because those people can’t see green, yellow, blue and pink.
The red-green colour blindness has 4 sub-types, or versions:
- Protanomaly: Reduced sensitivity to red, so people may see the read either as green, yellow, orange, brown etc.
- Protanopia: Extremely weak sensitivity to red. A worse version of the above type, where pink may be seen as gray, purple and lilac look like blue, etc.
- Deuteranomaly: Reduced sensitivity to green. Most light green shades look like red, pink or orange, while the medium green look like dark green.
- Deuteranopia: Extremely weak sensitivity to green. A worse version of the above type.
Pink letters on a gray background (or vice versa), or red letters on green background, or yellow letters on lime green background, or red letters on blue background, is an especially disturbing combination for some people (like me) who suffer from red-green colour blidness, because they see those colours as nearly the same (depending on the shade/brightness), but the border between the two colours become dark, “moving around” and causes re-focusing of the eyes (acts confusing about the actual distance to the object), hence an effect of constant blinking and de-focusing of the picture is generated. I see this on some icons in Rhino. I can distinguish red from blue, but when these are combined and small (some icons have a red “X” over a blue object), I also see some dark border around the “X” which must not be there when I zoom-in the image in a graphics program.
Colour-blind people also have a reduced perception of contrast, so they see a washed out picture, unlike the people with normal vision.
Distance to objects also changes the colour perception. For example, I have a weak sensitivity to many colours for distant objects (kind of a reduced colour palette, like the 8-bit game consoles from the 80s), but I can see them better, with a wider palette and closer to their actual colour as soon as the object is 20-30 cm from my eyes.
The rainbow scale of the “Draft angle” analysis in Rhino is confusing for my eyes, because I see a reduced amount of colours. Some shades of green I see as red, some shades of red I see as green, some shades of orange I see as green or yellow, etc.
Here is a basic colour palette comparing the different types of colour blindness. I guess that “Baseline” is representing what people with normal vision see.
Not everyone has the same perfect vision.
