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  • TECHNOLOGY FEATURE

Colour me better: fixing figures for colour blindness

Images can be made more accessible by choosing hues, shapes and textures carefully.
  1. Alla Katsnelson

    1. Alla Katsnelson is a science writer in Northampton, Massachusetts.

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Cartoon of an eye with the iris segmented into colours from an accessible colour palette and a pipette pointing to the pupil

Illustration by The Project Twins

Scott Harden can’t see rainbows. “When I look at a rainbow, I see two or maybe three colours, and they’re not evenly spaced out,” he says. So when scientific figures use a rainbow colour map, he finds them largely uninterpretable.

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Nature 598, 224-225 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02696-z

References

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