Impossible Colours

[davidn]

I really don't mean to harp on about this so much, but as I seem to have been becoming something of a spokesperson for the colourblind recently, I wanted to mention this form as deserving special attention.



The available colours and the dropdown lists are entirely disconnected from each other - there aren't any hover tooltips or anything on the colour swatches (I even had a look at their filenames, which didn't help either), and you have to just map the colours to names manually. This is impossible. In fact, never mind the colourblind - the vast majority of straight men can't do this, they just have to guess at random among the three different names for blue that someone's come up with.

This appeared when I was attempting to buy an article of clothing from the improbably-named Restoration Hardware site (which is a bit like opening a B&Q warehouse and calling it "World of Jumpers").

Edit: Oh, never mind, the hovers just don't work on Firefox 3.6.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"In fact, never mind the colourblind - the vast majority of straight men can't do this"

http://www.instantrimshot.com/

I agree though; this is why radio buttons were invented...

[kjorteo]

Trust me, not being straight doesn't help in this case! Even I can't figure it out.

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

The utterly annoying thing about that is there are seven colours and five choices. Too right there's a disconnect. You can tell when a programmer's made a completely lazy UI choice - it happens in a lot of web apps out of desparation, such is the state of the browser.

My mind immediately turned to this Dilbert (http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2002-07-12/) when I saw it - though that's far worse!