With so many mobile apps on the market, it’s critical to deliver flawless app experiences quickly while ensuring that the app stands out from the competition. Therefore to deliver high-quality apps to end-users, testers must perform testing on real devices for more accurate and faster results. However, with the availability of a wide range of real devices testing on each of them can be quite difficult due to differences in screen sizes, RAM, CPU power, and operating systems.
Therefore, real device cloud which offer quick access to thousands of real Android and iOS devices with various configurations of RAM, screen sizes, and operating systems become necessary for doing manual or automated mobile app testing. Teams can achieve more effective testing procedures by using a real device cloud, guaranteeing that the code and the application are completely checked and that high-quality apps are created.
People nowadays rely more on mobile technology which has made it essential for an app to be successful. This requires the app not to be only visually appealing, but also to be user-friendly for all users, especially for those who are color blind. This will guarantee that every user has a satisfying experience with the application. To achieve this, UI designs play an essential role in providing interfaces that are usable by all users, independent of visual impairments.
In this article, we will discuss some of the best practices for creating mobile app interfaces for color-blind users. Before moving ahead it is important to first get to know some fundamental concepts, such as what color blindness is, what are its types, and why it matters when designing the UI of an app. So let’s get started.
What is color blindness?
Colorblind individuals are those who usually fail to distinguish one color from another or frequently get confused between tones of color. The majority of color-blind persons perceive things clearly, just like any other person, but the only problem with them is that they cannot contrast between red, green, and blue light. There are various types of color blindness, but they all are characterized by blurry vision, color confusion, or the inability to distinguish between certain colors.
The environments in which individuals use the app might potentially increase these issues. This could include sitting far away from a television screen, tiny mobile screens, poor lighting, brightness on screens, and low-quality monitors.
Types of color blindness
Many people mistake color blindness for seeing in black and white only. Instead, color blindness is one common visual impairment that impairs people’s ability to perceive and discriminate colors. Certain mobile app interfaces may become challenging or annoying as a result.
People are affected by color blindness to varying extents and types. However, the majority of individuals are trichromatic, which means that they mix together the three colors, red, blue, and green to make sense of it. The incapability to clearly distinguish one or more of these colors results in various forms of color blindness or color vision deficiency. Generally, color blindness can be categorized into three primary types: total color blindness, blue-yellow, and red-green.
Color-blind people perceive content on web pages and other platforms in a very different way compared to those with normal vision. As a result, guaranteeing that every visitor has a similar experience to the user interface is critical.
Red-Green color blindness
This is the most common type of color blindness. It causes people to have trouble distinguishing between red and green colors. Someone having this problem tends to blend all colors that contain either red or green as a component of the total color.
There are four different forms of red-green color blindness depending on how much of each color a person can see:
Protanopia– In this red color is completely blind, and
protanomaly– In this, some red color is seen but looks dull, and green and blue are normal. The issue is the same with deuteranomaly and deuteranopia, except it is green in color.
Blue-Yellow color blindness
Blue-yellow color blindness is not the most common type of color blindness. People affected by this have trouble describing the difference between blue and yellow color. There are two forms of blue-yellow color blindness, depending on how much of each color a person can see:
Tritanomaly– It is the inability to differentiate between yellow and red or blue and green.
Tritanopia has trouble telling apart colors that contain blue or yellow (like purple and red or green and blue).
Total color blindness
The rarest type of color blindness, total color blindness affects a very small proportion of people. Individuals who are completely color blind are only able to distinguish between gray tones and have trouble seeing any other color.
Why it is important to design for color blindness
Color can affect a customer’s decision to buy, their emotional reaction, and their entire user experience, which makes color theory crucial to UI design.
There are numerous other reasons why it is imperative to design for color blindness. Color-blind users are unable to distinguish between different colors; hence designers are unable to judge a design’s readability or emotional impact just by looking at color. Developers should think about how users engage with color when utilizing it to create interactive designs that appeal to a variety of users, including those who are color-blind.
All users will have similar access to information if color blindness is taken into account when designing. Additionally, it aids in avoiding misunderstandings and confusion, particularly when information is conveyed through the use of colors. Moreover, considering color blindness during the design process demonstrates an organization’s commitment to creating inclusive and widely accessible applications.
Best mobile app interface design practices for users with color blindness
Designing for color blindness does not entail making the app less visually appealing; it simply entails taking color-blind users’ needs into account when creating mobile app interfaces. Even for people who are not visually impaired, bearing this in mind might be beneficial.
Making UI more inclusive for all users can be achieved by taking into account some basic principles of design and color usage. These are some guidelines for design that can help create color-blind user-friendly interfaces for apps and ultimately increase their usability.
Use color contrasts wisely
While color plays a significant role in mobile app interface design, it shouldn’t be the main or exclusive means of expressing functionality, meaning, or content. For color-blind people, the app’s usability and accessibility depend more on color contrast than on the actual color.
when developing an accessible mobile app one of the most difficult things to achieve is to understand the contrast and color options, especially for users who are color-blind. To increase the contrast ratio in a color-blind-friendly color palette and make it visible in a range of lighting conditions and screen sizes, using strong and bright color combinations is essential.
To help users understand and recall what the color combinations signify, make sure they are intuitive and consistent throughout the app. For instance, keeping buttons, links, icons, and alerts all the same color across the application and avoiding altering their purpose or meaning in various situations.
Apply textures and patterns
Using patterns and textures is another technique to update visual designs for users who are color-blind without depending on just color palettes. Color distinctions are useful when displaying data in graphs or pie charts. Including items with texture or pattern will help users distinguish between different sections with ease. Additionally, by adding text labels, segments become more comprehensible and accessible to color-blind users.
Combine colors with indicators and visual clues
For those who are color-blind, the app’s UI should be readable and accessible in ways other than just color. A specific kind of color blindness makes it difficult for affected individuals to recognize the color red.
Adding additional visual signals and indicators, such as forms, symbols, logos, or designs in attention-seeking fields, is one method to address this problem in addition to using colors. Facebook form fields and their associated error messages might be among the best examples.
Underline the links
Links that alert users to their presence are frequently underlined. Colored links look grayed out and blend in with the surrounding text for users who are color-blind. For this reason, it makes sense to underline the text. Text links with underlining make it simple to tell regular text from anchor text instantly. Using color is the most popular method of emphasizing the link. Since most persons with color vision deficiencies can see blue, employing it for this is perfect.
Don’t rely only on color to convey messages
It is widely accepted that green is positive, healthy, and correct, and that red indicates danger, harm, or anything associated with mistakes. However, it might be challenging for people who are colorblind or visually handicapped to recognize changes in screen color. Therefore, it is not advisable to rely solely on color to convey crucial messages when developing interfaces.
For instance, an exclamation point may be used in place of a red circle to signify a warning, or the application could use text, vibrations, and icons to display all of the user’s right and wrong actions. Even if not concerned with color blindness, it’s still a good idea to follow this practice since it can help eliminate confusion.
Test designs using color blindness simulators
It’s critical to test the design to make sure color-blind users can access it. That can be accomplished with a lot of excellent tools. Among the tools are web-based resources like Colour Oracle, Atmos, Stark, and Chrome DevTools. These tools enable designers to find any problems with the design, figure out how color-blind users interact with the options, and make modifications that are needed by simulating how the app appears to persons with various degrees of color blindness.
Utilize LambdaTest to perform quick accessibility tests
Providing a perfect user experience is crucial for UI testers, as it confirms that the application’s visible components perform and look as intended through the use of accessible interface design. Websites and applications that are accessible, readable, and used in particular ways are necessary for those who are color blind.
Conducting accessibility testing and verifying that the user interface is engaging and accessible to all users is essential for ensuring that users with color blindness do not experience any accessibility-related difficulties when using a mobile application.
Testing for mobile accessibility aims to ascertain whether an app is usable by people with disabilities. thankfully, there are several tools available to assist with that; nevertheless, selecting the appropriate tool for the testing is crucial. Using the appropriate tool can assist developers and testers in determining whether mobile apps have accessibility issues.
LambdaTest is a powerful test automation platform that enables testers to test UI elements of any mobile and web application. To design new UI tests or improve current ones, it allows developers to select from a variety of programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, C#, C+, and others.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform to run manual and automated tests for both websites and mobile applications at scale. The platform enables the execution of both automated and real-time testing on over 3000 real devices, browsers, and platforms, guaranteeing that the application functions properly in every setting that users may encounter.
It is one of the few platforms that offer testers a very convenient means of doing interactive mobile app testing. Its support for numerous testing frameworks enables developers to create UI tests that are scalable, robust, and unaffected by changes in the underlying code.
Its record and replay capability also allows testers to record tests once and play them again on a variety of desktop, web, and mobile devices. Developers may quickly identify which UI tests passed or failed, identify areas of issue, and share data with other team members for expedited resolution with the use of comprehensive reporting and screenshot notifications. To shorten testing durations and increase
Conclusion
When designing user interfaces and enhancing the accessibility of the application it is imperative to consider colorblind users as well as users with normal vision. This is to guarantee that everyone has a seamless and accessible app experience.
By having an understanding of various types of color blindness and following the best practices mentioned above developers can design a user interface that offers an enjoyable experience to every user. But remember, creating a great UI color palette requires more than just considering color blindness; other accessibility considerations should also be taken into account by developers.
