[OSM-talk] Survey for people with color vision deficiencies about the street classes in OSM's Mapnik style

johannes.kroeger at hcu-hamburg.de johannes.kroeger at hcu-hamburg.de
Sun Oct 7 14:54:02 BST 2012


Hi there,

I am a geomatics student currently working on my bachelor thesis (in Germany, not sure how that compares to a bachelor elsewhere). It's about map design for people with color vision deficiency (color vision impairment, colorblindness, etc). After wanting to analyse the whole osm.org Mapnik map style at first, I quickly realised I had to reduce the scope and thus "only" worked on the main street classes. I carefully adjusted their colors to keep the main hue (blue, green, red etc) but to make them identifiable and distinguishable for CVD affected people.

Now I am testing those (and the original colors in comparison) with an online survey. To get a good amount of data I need many participants of course, so if you are affected by color vision related problems, please participate. Share the link!

The test takes about 20 minutes, I have seen numbers from 12 to 40 minutes. I assume it takes longer the more severe the effect is. You can pause anytime and you can skip questions even though that would not be so great for me. It presents a _lot_ of map images with simple tasks for identification of the streets inside. You can take the survey in English or German.

The survey: http://geomatik.enjoys.it/limesurvey/index.php?sid=94319&lang=en&osm

I will report the findings in the end. If the test validates my new colors as better, then I will try to get them into the main style. At least that was my main goal. Let's first see what the results are.

Thanks for your attention and thanks for helping out, Hannes

PS: If you want to stalk me, these are my rather neglected OSM profiles (partly in german I think), I've been around since 2008. Ban potlatch!!!!1 ;)
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:HannesHH
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/HannesHH



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