colorblind friendly languages bar

[dgutson]

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Hi, I'm colorblind and it is not possible for me to distinguish this:

Two suggestions:

• either enable mouse over tooltips telling the language
• do what Trello did

[github-actions[bot]]

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[cehfisher]

Hello @dgutson - GitHub offers several theme options that can help improve your experience, including themes specifically designed for color contrast perception issues.

To change your theme settings:

1. Click on your profile picture in the top-right corner
2. Select Settings
3. In the left sidebar, click on Appearance
4. Under "Theme preferences," you'll see several theme options

Could you please try switching to either "Tritanopia Light," "Tritanopia Dark," "Protanopia & Deuteranopia Light," or "Protanopia & Deuteranopia Dark"? These themes are specifically designed to improve visibility for users with different types of color vision deficiencies.

After changing the theme, please retest the functionality you were having trouble with and let us know if it resolves your issue.

For more detailed information on managing themes, please refer to the GitHub documentation on the topic.

Thank you!

[dgutson]

Thanks @cehfisher ,

Thank you for your response and for suggesting the use of ���deuteranopia” or “protanopia” display themes. I’d like to clarify why such filters are not a solution to the problem I raised regarding the color encoding of programming languages on GitHub.

The core issue is not contrast, but information loss due to a numerical limitation in color perception. Let me explain:

In normal color vision, a person might be able to distinguish between 10 different colors used to encode 10 different programming languages. However, for someone with red-green colorblindness (like deuteranopia or protanopia), those same 10 colors may collapse into only 4 distinguishable categories. That means 6 of those 10 colors become visually indistinguishable, even if you increase the contrast, brightness, or saturation.

The themes you suggest attempt to enhance contrast for better visibility, which is helpful in other contexts (like reading text), but it does not solve this information collapse. This is not a perceptual nuance; it's a mathematical compression of input: I get only 4 signals where others get 10.

This is why accessibility in this case requires redundancy in the information channel, not just visual enhancement. A simple and effective solution would be to display the name of the programming language on hover over the color dot. That way, users who cannot distinguish the color can still access the same information, regardless of their color perception abilities.

Thank you again for your attention to accessibility. I hope this explanation makes the issue clearer and helps guide a more inclusive improvement.

[cehfisher]

Thank you so much @dgutson for your detailed explanation of your issue! We apologize for misunderstanding what you were reporting earlier. We'll pass this additional information along to the accessibility team and follow up soon with any updates or questions.