New Moodle theme: Accessability and Colour Blindness

New Moodle theme: Accessability and Colour Blindness

by Doug Moody -
Number of replies: 7

Gareth,

I have to respectfully disagree on your conclusions about the blue and green colors. Those colors are precisely the ones NOT to use. This is because blue and green are the colors most often associated with color blindness, and that affects boys more then girls too.

I do use RED for emphasis simply because it can be read even by those with color blindness. As far as it being "angry", don't say that to a Chinese person. Red is lucky in China!

(Edited by Mary Evans - original submission Friday, 31 January 2014, 12:30 PM)

Split from this original discussion thread:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=253045&parent=1097611

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In reply to Doug Moody

Re: Loving the new theme on moodle.org

by Gareth J Barnard -
Gambar Core developers Gambar Particularly helpful Moodlers Gambar Plugin developers

Hi Doug,

Interesting.  Blue and green were not an issue as I worked in a girls school with no reports to my knowledge (and I would have been told) of colour blindness in my classes.  Info on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotopic_sensitivity_syndrome.  I did check with the students and they agreed that the colours helped.  What colour pen would you suggest?

'Red' being an 'angry' colour was stated as such on my PGCE as a part of the teacher training not to use when marking.

Cheers,

Gareth

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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Loving the new theme on moodle.org

by Richard Oelmann -
Gambar Core developers Gambar Particularly helpful Moodlers Gambar Plugin developers Gambar Testers

Even for colour blind readers, blue and green in themselves should not be a major problem - its when you use both together and say something like 'the blue words are all verbs and the green ones are nouns' because colour blind users can't tell the difference.

If you are just using a blue pen for writing on a whiteboard, or a green pen for writing on a whiteboard and not mixing the colours, just using it to avoid the high contrast of black on white, there shouldn't be any problem.

That said, with a few primary school pupils who have had poor vision in the past, the specialist advice I was given at the time (for an electronic whiteboard) was a dark blue background and yellow text smile But then one of my other pupils struggled because he actually needed a rose coloured overlay to assist with his reading!

Red=angry seems to be something that came around while I was teaching, equated with the children seeing lots of red pen all over their work and we started to use green pens to mark for a while. After a year or two of green ink in their books, the children started to equate green writing with the same negative feelings. The solution - improved, constructive marking: stop making the marking a negative experience and it wont matter what colour its in smile

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In reply to Richard Oelmann

Re: Loving the new theme on moodle.org

by Gareth J Barnard -
Gambar Core developers Gambar Particularly helpful Moodlers Gambar Plugin developers

True smile

I used only one colour.  When we had projectors in all the rooms, I switched to presentations so save me from getting RSI and breathing in the fumes of the pens.  Then I exported the slides to images (with a contrasting text / background) and made them into 'Book' resources so that students could go back and forth in a 'random access' way.  Also, students who were away could read up on what they had missed before they came to the next lesson.

The snag with repeated positive marking is that the students then have difficulty with failure.  So, perhaps the best comments are a mixture of both.

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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: Loving the new theme on moodle.org

by Richard Oelmann -
Gambar Core developers Gambar Particularly helpful Moodlers Gambar Plugin developers Gambar Testers

Ah - indeed Gareth, but I did say 'constructive' marking, not necessarily the same as all being overbalanced in either direction smile

BUT - this is a discussion about the theme, rather than a pedagogical discussion about the various merits of different coloured inks for marking work :D

And in that respect, I think taking the edge off the black, but not so much as to make it the pale grey you find on some sites is probably fine - personally I find some sites take this too far and I have difficulty reading them because there is insufficient contrast - they tone down the black and they take the dazzle out of the white, It needs the right balance and Im sure our Moodle HQ designers who have done a superb job in this will  find that balance smile

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In reply to Richard Oelmann

Re: Loving the new theme on moodle.org

by Mary Cooch -
Gambar Documentation writers Gambar Moodle HQ Gambar Particularly helpful Moodlers Gambar Testers Gambar Translators

(Going slightly off topic but still an interesting discussion -if it continues, perhaps we should split it) I concur with Richard about the blue background and yellow text- I was told that at my (former) school too. And we gave up marking in red years ago in favour of green because it is less " in your face". 

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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Loving the new theme on moodle.org

by Gareth J Barnard -
Gambar Core developers Gambar Particularly helpful Moodlers Gambar Plugin developers

To pull the topic back onto themes and the Moodle site theme.  There should be 'inclusional choice'.  That is providing a colour scheme that enables everybody to feel within the same group and not separated and yet at the same time maintain personalisation.  Back in the days of M1.9 I created several different versions of the same theme and allowed students to pick the one they wanted.  This was attached to their user profile and therefore as soon as they logged in.  So everybody was using the same system but it becomes more 'personalised' but without the belief that any one student is being segregated away and therefore a target of bullying.

So why not have a small maintainable element of the theme CSS that is choose-able at the user level.  They have to be small as all of the CSS is compressed and cached together.  Unlike my Mutant Banjo which facilitates this at a whole site level so complete separation is possible.

There used to be a 'screenreader' user profile setting.  Should there be something similar on Moodle.org, but in a form where everybody can choose between a few different styles, some of which are more suitable for certain circumstances?  Even if it was simply the background colour on the 'body' tag and the CSS was refactored such that no other specialised selectors overrode it.  So no need for '!important' (not important ;) ) smile.

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In reply to Gareth J Barnard

Re: New Moodle theme: Accessability and Colour Blindness

by Mary Evans -

Dear Gareth,

As you will see I have split this discussion thread from it original place, mainly because it was getting overshadowed by the "...Loving the new theme on moodle.org!' post..."

And since it is a worthwhile topic for discussion, I thought it deserved a place of its own.

Regards

Mary

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