September 6th marks international Colour Blind Awareness day; a day dedicated to getting people talking about colour blindness, how many people it affects, and how it impacts those that have it. About one in 12 men and one in 200 women are colour blind. As with many disabilities, the provision of accessibility isn’t great. Services designed to accommodate people with colour blindness are pretty uncommon.
Mapping, with its many layers of complex information designated by colours as well as text, is no exception. Colour is an excellent way of visually separating and categorising information for most people, but it’s not so helpful if you can’t tell red from green or blue from purple.
It’s for these reasons that Delib made some important changes to the way Citizen Space Geospatial is styled. Rather than having colour as the only way user-added layers, features and fills could be differentiated, we changed the styling to include other visual markers as well. Some of these changes include:
- Pins are now styled to include a letter that corresponds to the layer they’re on
- There are different styles of fill, such as patterns, rather than just transparent, semi-transparent and opaque
- Lines can now be dotted, dashed and everything in between
- The key shows the type of feature, not just its colour
We’ve also greatly increased the range of basemaps to choose from, with higher-contrast options available.
While layers and features can still be differentiated by colour, it’s not the only way of receiving that information.
Aesthetics are important – but only if they aren’t a barrier to entry.
To find out more about Citizen Space Geospatial, you can book a free demo and we’ll walk you through it.
