DaSH - Colourblind friendly; good practices

22 Apr 2016

Hi DaSHers,

Today we had a wide ranging discussion which meandered around two main themes: colour blind friendly figures; and good practice programming.

Colour blind friendly figures

Over the last few weeks, Tom has been investigating how to simplify making figures colourblind friendly. He brought a few simple solutions. Although it is very easy to chose and set colour blind friendly colours/palettes, knowing how and where to find them is tricky depending on the platform/program you are in. So here is a rainbow range:

hexcode normalname designername
#000000 colourblindblack black
#999999 colourblindgrey dustygrey
#0072B2 colourblinddarkblue deepcerulean
#56B4E9 colourblindlightblue pictonblue
#009E73 colourblindgreen greenhaze
#F0E442 colourblindyellow starship
#E69F00 colourblindorange orangepeel
#D55E00 colourblindred tenn
#CC79A7 colourblindpink hopbush

One of the biggest challenges was finding a way to check how an entire image looked with a particular kind of colour blindness. The app ‘Color Oracle’ (http://colororacle.org/) provided a free, simple, easy, rapid, cross platform solution. It just changes the screen colour palette temporaily, allowing a quick check (if your using R, Paul Murrel from R-core recommends the ‘dichromat’ package ). Here are three different checks of the original image.

Normal vision

imageref

Deuteranopia

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Protanopia

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Tritanopia

imageref

Good Practice Programming

A number of issues were discussed around good practice programming including: script design; including tests; memory management; efficiency testing and overall profiling of code performance, debugging. Mike and Damien provided links to various resources throughout the discussion to help support the discussion. These are:

Colour issues

R weirdness

Speed issues

Testing

Building a package with devtools

Errors and debugging

Functions in R

R’s copy semantics and memory

Profiling R code:

Next week (29 Apri)

Intro to GIS concepts (with Manifold and QGIS)

Coming up

When: Friday 22 April 2016, 0915hrs - 1015hrs

Where: the ground floor Flex Room at IMAS / ACE CRC Salamanca (‘the Waterfront’).