Adding a vision impairment/color blindness feature

[gbit-is]

Describe the feature:

An option, either set on a user level or just a button you can click that would offer diffirent colors for people with some vision problems, I can only comment on my own (I am color blind) I am not gonna assume I can describe what would help someone who is for example partially blind

But in my case (protan color blindness) I would want the option to set kibana in a mode in which I can actually properly see the diffirence between colors in a graph and not having to hover and highlight them to see which is which

The best way I can imagine for my case would be when activated kibana would:

• limit the color palette kibana will use when assigning colors to a graph when the amount of colors is low enough
• When the amount of colors goes over the limited selection, going into grayscale colors
  -- at this point we hit a small problem, what colors to assign, I think that would depend on if it's a fill object or stroke object (donut or line)
• fill object: reuse colors, normal ones and grayscale and add for example vertical lines in it, run out again, horizontal ones, then at a 45° angle, -45°, dotted, etc
• stroke objects: reuse colors, normal ones and grayscale, first have a simple dashed line, run out again, dotted line, etc

at some point all safe colors and patterns would be exhausted and then ofcourse it would have to fall back on the normal colors

but with 5 colors and 4 grayscale options we already have 9 diffirent colors without having to pattern things
with those 9 colors and just 4 patterning options we have 36 options, on top of the original 9 for a total of 45
If a graph has more then 45 lines, that sounds like a bad graph to me

Describe a specific use case for the feature:

This is something I have been thinking about a lot, since i use Kibana for several hours each day and I am colorblind (protan), instead of trying to explain it, I will just steal someone elses explination

A person with protan type color blindness tends to see greens, yellows, oranges, reds, and browns as being more similar shades of color than normal, especially in low light. A very common problem is that purple colors look more like blue. Another common issue is that pink colors appear to be gray, especially if the pink is a more reddish pink or salmon color. Another symptom specific to protan color vision deficiency is that red colors look darker than normal. For example, if red text is printed on a black background, it can be very hard to read because the red appears to be very dark.

So yeah, as a person with that type of vision can have a lot of problems diffirentiating between colors
I created this picture to explain the way I see the world, in my case the black bars would be the 5 color I mention above

The gray ones desribe areas where diffirentiating between colors is hard, simplefied somewhat

Color blind people are 4.5% of the worlds population (according to wikipedia)
vision impaired are 13% (again, wikipedia)
partially blind are 3,5% (rough calcuation based on info from wikipedia)

So this has a possibility of helping a large group of users

While I can not make any statements on what would help people with problems other then mine, I would gladly donate some of my time to discuss this further

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-accessibility (Project:Accessibility)

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-design (Team:Kibana-Design)

[ryankeairns]

@gbit-is thank you for taking the time to share your personal experience and suggestions. This is one that will take some time to address, but I can think of a couple of ways in which we could make progress.

In some areas, we are now allowing users to change color palettes (Maps and Lens come to mind; see below) and our component library (EUI) provides a color picker with some pre-built palettes.

Lens

Maps

EUI color palette picker

Now, this is just me brainstorming, but I wonder if we could add additional palettes for common types of color blindness to that component (further into the future providing for angles, patterns, etc.). These could then, potentially, be applied in the aforementioned applications.

Additionally, we've been having some very early discussions around theming things like Dashbaords and having that theme setting carry through to other applications, in a global fashion. This gets better and, frankly, more realistic once we provide user specific settings which is also on our roadmap.

There is potential for capabilities like this to take shape, but it will take time for the necessary pieces to be put in place. Regardless, this is very helpful and timely feedback as we delve into related efforts. Thanks again.

[gbit-is]

Thanks for taking so well to this and for this detailed reply*

I have not been using lense much, but the EUI looks cool
my current cluster, (which is up to date) started in Kibana 6 and I tried out lense in beta but haven't used it much since

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"I wonder if we could add additional palettes for common types of color blindness"

I defineatly see a lot of potential by providing color blindness types in the EUI as a first step, providing this for all visualisations, especially as a theme sounds like a major challenge to me but addings options to the EUI providing one preset for each type of color blindness sounds like a "simple" step to address this within components using the EUI

If I could select color blind presets in lense, I would defineatly be using lense more

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Again, I would very happily donate some of my time to this, so if there ever is a beta release with color blind EUI options I wouldn't hesitate to fire up a small setup to try it :)

*(English is not my first language, so if that sounded weird, what I mean is I am very happy with the positive and detailed response I recieved from you)

[ryankeairns]

We appreciate your offer to assist and review. I've opened a discussion on the EUI side with the aforementioned suggestion. Feel free to follow along over there: elastic/eui#4396

PS: it did not sound weird; I understood what you wrote :)