Commons:Creating accessible illustrations

This page gives advice to people who create illustrations (maps, graphs, diagrams, etc.) about how to design them in such a way to be accessible to people who may not have perfect vision.

The following palettes are color-blind friendly, meaning that in a chart or diagram, people with color blindness would still see these as separate colors.

• Use redundant coding. This means don't use color as the only way of distinguishing between items. Also use patterns or hatchings or different shapes.
• Use colors that contrast in hue as well as brightness.

The GIMP is an open source, free image editing software for Windows, MacOS & Linux. It has a built-in color-blindness filter, so that you can preview how your chart or diagram would appear to a color-blind person. It can be activated from the menu View->Display filters. Click on the "Color Deficient Vision" on the left window and then on the right-pointing arrow to make it active. By clicking again on the filter, which now is in the right (active) window, you can choose which of the three main types of color blindness to simulate: Protanopia (insensitivity to red), Deyteranopia (insensitivity to green) or Tritanopia (insensitivity to blue).

• How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to color blind people ^{[dead link]}
• Check if existing Commons image pages are color-blind-friendly ^{[dead link]}
• Colorblind colorlab – choose a color palette, and then see it through a filter as a colorblind person would