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Figures in focus: Accessible color schemes

Using color in data visualization can help the reader understand your data…except when it doesn’t. Indeed, a 2012 meta-analysis found that roughly 8% of Caucasian men and 4% to 6.5% of Chinese and Japanese men have impaired color vision, with the numbers being much lower in women. 

In some ways, life was easier when journals charged a lot for color figures and we used grayscale to excellent effect. What to do in the free color era?

  • Use a color scheme that can be interpreted by readers with impaired color vision, keeping in mind that it’s not just red-green––some combinations such as orange and green, or blue and purple, also pose problems. Instead of red and green for micrographs, use magenta and green. Check out our resources section at the end for more information.
  • Use software to test your figures––this can be done in Photoshop (View > Proof Setup > Color Blindness), GIMP (View → Display Filters→ Color-deficient vision; https://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/gimp-display-filter-dialog.html), and using other software such as ColorOracle (https://colororacle.org/)
  • Convey information in more than one way. For example, you can show separate channels for micrographs, in addition to the merged image. In graphs, you can make lines dashed and solid, and you can show data points with different shapes––go wild (but not too wild!) with squares and triangles. Your colorblind readers will thank you, as will the old-school folks who like to print out papers on black-and-white printers.

Here’s an example––don’t get excited about the data, they are not real.

Here is the original…

…and here is what it would look like to someone with the most common form of impaired color vision

Not so great, right? We presented this to our figure expert and here’s what he came up with:

In addition to having a color scheme that looks almost exactly the same to people with regular and impaired color vision, this graph has a clean, professional look with easy-to-read text, and clear axis labels. You might notice that the two data points have different symbols too, so even if you are that person who prints the paper out on the black-and-white laser printer (and we love you for that), you can still understand the graph!

We can help you make great graphs with accessible color schemes. Learn more about our figure preparation services and contact us for a quote!