When creating quizzes for a general audience, you probably consider your data first and foremost. But as we’ve outlined before, color and formatting choices can drastically affect the player experience. Color can add thematic flavor, usability, and even additional information to a quiz. But if you’re not considering colorblindness in your design process, you’re missing some players. Colorblindness affects 1 in 8 men, and 1 in 200 women.
Minimize The Number of Colors
Adding a huge variety of colors to your quiz is challenging in more than one way. It makes it hard to make things harmonious, and it also makes it difficult to keep everything color-blindness friendly. The more colors you add, the harder it will be to keep everything distinguishable for color-blind players. This is especially concerning when you consider that shades that seem very contrasting to some (such as bright red and bright green) aren’t for everyone. It’s also tempting to ignore other design and formatting options when you rely on color alone to carry your design.
Use Contrast
Specifically, contrast in value and not just hue. Value refers to the darkness or lightness of a color; hue refers to the place on the color spectrum. So a shade of light blue and dark blue might have the same hue, and a different value. Light blue and light purple, on the other hand, could have the same value and differ only in hue.
Using a mix of light and dark colors, even if they all share the same hue, can make your quiz more understandable and scannable for all players.
Design In Redundancy
Design redundancy, in this case, means designing your information in a way where multiple elements exist to relay the same information. Redundancy is great both as a “plan B” for people who may not process one indicator, and as a general reminder and reinforcer for everyone.
In most cases, information relayed by color can also be relayed in another way. You can indicate emphasis and contrast with text formatting options, such as bold, underline, or italics. You can add labels or line breaks in other cases. Even symbols, such as the bullets for themed answers on word ladders, can add another layer of design redundancy.
Test It Yourself
If you really want to be sure everything is working as you’d hope for color blind players, you can always check it yourself! There are multiple online tools to help choose appropriate color schemes and understand how colorblindness shifts color perception. But for the most specific check, you can always use a filter like this one to review your quiz.
Did you find this post helpful? If so, you might want to take a look at some of our other How To posts. Or, you can test your trivia knowledge with some fun quizzes on Sporcle! You can start with the one below.
