Colour Blind Safe
- Okabe and Ito palette
- deuteranopia safe
- accessible categorical colours
Six hues from the Okabe and Ito set, which stay apart for the common kinds of colour blindness.
Opens an image model with the palette in the prompt. The same words work on a video model.
- #E69F00
- #56B4E9
- #009E73
- #F0E442
- #0072B2
- #D55E00
What it is for
About one man in twelve and one woman in two hundred sees red and green differently. A palette that separates only by hue loses those readers, and it loses them quietly, because nothing on the page looks broken.
The fix costs nothing. Choose hues that stay apart under the common kinds of colour blindness, and give each one its own lightness as well, so the set survives a grey print and a bad projector.
How it works
Take the values from a published set rather than picking by eye. This one is the Okabe and Ito palette, drawn for exactly this job and used in scientific figures ever since.
Keep red away from green. Red and green at the same lightness are the pair that fails for most colour blind readers, and it is the pair that charts reach for first.
Vary the lightness across the set. Print the picture in grey and look: if two areas match there, they will match for some readers in colour too.
When to use it
Use it for a chart, a map, a diagram, a set of states in an interface, or anything where the colour is the meaning rather than the decoration.
Leave it alone when you want a mood. These are working hues, and they were not chosen to sit together beautifully.
Told apart from its neighbours
Categorical Data does the same job for a chart, but the ColorBrewer qualitative sets are only marked colour blind safe up to three or four classes. This set holds apart further.
High Contrast fixes lightness rather than hue. A colour blind safe palette can still be hard to read when two of its colours land at the same lightness on the ground behind them.
Where it was used
Masataka Okabe and Kei Ito published this eight colour set in 2002 for scientific figures, and it became the default in research plotting. Six of the eight are here. The other two are black and reddish purple.
- Scientific figures
- Research plotting libraries
- Transit maps
The prompt
Run it as it stands, or drop the colour clause into a prompt you already have. It works in an image prompt and in a video prompt.
<subject>, colour blind safe palette of orange, sky blue, bluish green, yellow, deep blue and vermillion, no red beside green anywhere, each colour also separated by lightness so the set still reads in grey
What goes wrong
A red and a green come back at the same lightness. Name the hues you want and say no red beside green anywhere.
The set arrives beautiful and useless, with every colour at one lightness. Say each colour is also separated by lightness so the set still reads in grey.
Leave out
red beside green, two colours at the same lightness, hue as the only difference
Watch for
Hue must never carry the message alone. Add a label, a shape or a position beside it.
Questions
Paint it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
