ABSTRACT FAA‐HF‐STD‐010A introduced a standard set of colors for coding air traffic control (ATC) displays. It was developed to accommodate viewers who have mild‐to‐moderate color‐vision deficits (CVDs) without compromising usability for color normals. The test conditions were dark, which represents the majority of ATC environments, but that choice left the palette's suitability for use in brighter environments, such as ATC towers during daytime, unknown. We tested the palette under worst‐case tower illumination and found that viewers with normal color vision and many with CVDs can recognize the colors almost perfectly if they can increase the display's luminance sufficiently to compensate—no Bezold–Brücke corrections are needed. Text rendered using all foreground/background combinations remains legible, too. The FAA standard color palette is usable under the full range of ambient illuminances encountered by US air traffic controllers and most other computer‐display viewers. The colors are general‐purpose and, therefore, suited for many purposes besides ATC that use color coding—especially if CVDs must be accommodated.
Post et al. (Mon,) studied this question.