BRYAN@SU-SIERRA.ARPA (08/07/84)
From: Doug Bryan <BRYAN@SU-SIERRA.ARPA> >> What about COLOR BLIND engineers ??? >> Something to think about. Very few people are completely color blind (that is they only see some sort of gray scale). Thus they can still differentiate between a great number of colors/shades/hues. Because of this a good color CAD system should (must?) allow the user to define his own colors that will correspond to the information stored and presented by the system. User definition of information representation is fairly easy to build into a CAD system if its need is fully recognized when the system is designed. One reason that many currently available CAD systems do not support user definition of information representation is that the older display devices could not support a great number of colors. Although this loophole may still exist for hard-copy devices it surely does not for CRT devices. Most workstations now support 16 to 24 bit color lookup tables. A 24 bit CLU allows for the definition of over 16 million different colors. Also most workstations have at least 4 bit planes for display allowing the simultanious presentation of 16 colors. Eight planes allows the display of 256 colors. It is worth remembering that color is information. When an application needs to present a great deal of information in a small space (a CRT) for the user to comprehend quickly, color is a great asset. Are there any psychologists out there that would like to handle the color blind issue in more detail? I have read that most people (even those that are "color blind") can distinguish between over 200 hues and that 250 should be considered a maximum number for information presentation. Doug Bryan bryan@su-sierra -------