Remember the color-blind in your design!

Yes, you guessed it – I am color-blind. I cannot differentiate green from gray and sometimes especially on the web, green from red. Many people think color-blindness is the inability to see color (i.e. see only black and white) which I find very funny. Color-blind people can see color, but not differentiate between a few of them.

So here are some facts – In the US, 7% of the male population are color-blind

Also, most early adopters for technology are males.
Given these facts, I’m somewhat surprised that a lot of services, even the most popular ones do not design or account for this.

Google trends uses color codes to differentiate between trend graphs. Compete uses color codes to differentiate between websites in their graphs. Recently I was very interested in a service that could allow me to aggregate all my email accounts. I tried Fuser but I was unable to use it because they use color codes to differentiate which email account the email came from. For me that was a deal-breaker and I will not be able to use their service till they find another way and I believe 7% of males will not as well (hope someone’s listening!!). Note: I am waiting for Orgoo to launch and I certainly hope they don’t do the same thing …

However, it then goes back to my original question ? Why do services not take this factor into account when designing their services ?