Discord Role Colors

[Jorell al'Racha]

In Discord, I found that the Citizen role color was hard to read on the dark theme. I made a suggesion to alter it, but I wonder if the Discord admins would be interested in doing a review and update of all the role colors in Discord to ensure that they meet a passing score on contrast accessibility.

I am, of course, volunteering to take on the effort to investigate each of the colors and propose changes where they are hard to read on the various themes in Discord, report back to the appropriate Discord admin for review and implementation. I just need a screenshot of all of the available roles.

Web accessibility is high on my list and I am more than happy to help out, even though I am still too new to apply to be Staff.

 

[Qamra Daielin]

Hey Jorell, send me a message on discord wulfin#3174

 

[Cattrin al'Modrah]

I know a few of us have colorblind family members (myself included) and role color versus background color in Discord is a really good point. Something to keep in mind for that is that colorblindness isn't a square peg in a square hole, it's very much a spectrum. What my family member can easily see may not be what someone else with the disorder can see. It might be a good idea to use the different degrees of colorblindness as the baseline for role color contrasting in the Discord themes.

 

[Jorell al'Racha]

I know a few of us have colorblind family members (myself included) and role color versus background color in Discord is a really good point. Something to keep in mind for that is that colorblindness isn't a square peg in a square hole, it's very much a spectrum. What my family member can easily see may not be what someone else with the disorder can see. It might be a good idea to use the different degrees of colorblindness as the baseline for role color contrasting in the Discord themes.

You make excellent points. We can't solely rely on color to convey information, and with the seemingly wide array of colors that exist in Discord, there may be limited changes we can make to help accommodate colorblindness. Clicking on someone's name will help give their roles, but at the same time, it may be hard to tell which role is being used to give their name a color.

Look at me saying "we". They. Not me. Not yet at least! (give me four more months and I'll be junior tech staff, I'm sure.)

 

[Jorell al'Racha]

I just found in Discord the Accessibility settings, one of which places the Role Color in a dot beside the name. Terribly useful for those who are using the Light Theme. Game changing!

Discord > Settings > Accessibility > Role Colors Role Colors in Names	Discord > Settings > Accessibility > Role Colors Role Colors Next To Names

There are also some other settings related to Accessibility that are worth investigating.

 

[Leira Galene]

This is a great idea to review, good idea Jorell. Colorblind accessibility is an important thing to me in presenting my work, so I'm glad to see it taken seriously everywhere. There are definitely a lot of sites that have information on colors to use, although I'm really only familiar with scientific plot colormap sites, so I'm not sure how applicable they would be. But I'm sure there are checkers or suggestion sites for web purposes as well. Maybe there are even already Discord suggestions? Another option would be to pull a colorblind-friendly palette and custom-color pick from it.

 

[Cattrin al'Modrah]

Another option would be to pull a colorblind-friendly palette and custom-color pick from it.

I really like this idea. My brother is colorblind and once was in an informal study for it. Where he stopped seeing certain colors, others were just starting to see those colors. Having a custom palette available would probably be the most accessible friendly option of the bunch without having to worry too much about missing someone who has a different form of colorblindness from the average. If each user could choose, say, "Normal Tower theme, dark mode; normal Tower theme, light mode; Custom color Tower theme" I think that might be the most appropriate.

 

[Qamra Daielin]

Okay. This is about discord. We can only work within their framework which is dark mode or light mode and those are user picked (in preferences). At one point they were starting to roll out a colourblind mode, but they seem to have removed it.

We are looking at role colours (which we CAN control). I’m not guaranteeing they will change, but we are going through them and we do have access to a colourblind tool that we can also check. So we are looking at it!

 

[Leira Galene]

Oh yes to be clear, I was only talking about role colors, since I looked for a server I can create roles in and saw they have the custom color ability. That's cool that you're looking into it!

@Cattrin al'Modrah re themes, I know some custom themes do exist, but I don't think they're simple to make. I don't know how colorblind-friendly it is, but one I know about is the Dracula theme. I wouldn't be surprised if people had made colorblind-friendly CSS skins for it.