Investigating Color-Blind User-Interface Accessibility via Simulated Interfaces

Over 300 million people who live with color vision deficiency (CVD) have a decreased ability to distinguish between colors, limiting their ability to interact with websites and software packages. User-interface designers have taken various approaches to tackle the issue, with most offering a high-contrast mode. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) outline some best practices for maintaining accessibility that have been adopted and recommended by several governments; however, it is currently uncertain how this impacts perceived user functionality and if this could result in a reduced aesthetic look. In the absence of subjective data, we aim to investigate how a CVD observer might rate the functionality and aesthetics of existing UIs. However, the design of a comparative study of CVD vs. non-CVD populations is inherently hard; therefore, we build on the successful field of physiologically based CVD models and propose a novel simulation-based experimental protocol, where non-CVD observers rate the relative aesthetics and functionality of screenshots of 20 popular websites as seen in full color vs. with simulated CVD. Our results show that relative aesthetics and functionality correlate positively and that an operating-system-wide high-contrast mode can reduce both aesthetics and functionality. While our results are only valid in the context of simulated CVD screenshots, the approach has the benefit of being easily deployable, and can help to spot a number of common pitfalls in production. Finally, we propose a AAA–A classification of the interfaces we analyzed.