This summary is produced by the author, and not by AI.
I was working on a feature in Tabular Editor 3 recently to allow users to easily distinguish objects in the TOM Explorer that have been changed since the last save. This has been a feature many of our customers have asked for for a long time, and I’m happy that it finally made it into 3.27.0.
While brainstorming the feature, we quickly realized we should reuse the same pattern for indicating the different types of changes we use in the Model Diff View. That is, an orange background color for modified objects, green for added objects, red for deleted objects. Pretty standard stuff, right?
Well, when I applied the same pattern of colors to the new change indicators in the TOM Explorer, I had a bit of a surprise:
Most readers of this article won’t notice the issue, but people with deuteranopia (red-green color blindness) can’t easily distinguish the background colors that indicate addition and deletion. In fact, for me, the colors look so similar that I thought there was a bug in the code styling the elements of the TOM Explorer. I spent 20 minutes debugging before realizing that my color blindness had played a trick on me. I never noticed this problem in the Model Diff View because the red hues are always shown on the left pane, while the green hues are always on the right. So even though I also can’t distinguish the red and green colors in that dialog, it is much less of an issue because of the context (left side = before, right side = after).
In the TOM Explorer, however, all changes are shown in the same pane of glass, and so other than the background color, we can only use a few smaller visual cues like the plus/minus badge on the icon, and the struck out text of deleted items, to distinguish “added” from “deleted”. As such, having background colors that are easy to distinguish when quickly glancing over the TOM Explorer becomes much more important.
The second TOM Explorer screenshot simulates deuteranopia with the model by Machado, Oliveira, and Fernandes (2009). A simulation can only approximate the effect, because color vision differs from person to person.
While working to improve this, I realized we need to do better on accessibility. The September release includes a “Color blindness mode” option that changes the default “green” background color to a more accessible alternative for people with various forms of color blindness.
As a WinForms app, Tabular Editor 3 already integrates well with Windows UI Automation, enabling the use of screen readers and other assistive technologies. However, there may well be other areas where we need to consider good accessibility practices up front, when designing new features, as this example demonstrates. Going forward, we’ll ask ourselves this question with every new UI feature we ship.
We also kindly invite all Tabular Editor 3 users to reach out if they encounter any other accessibility issues with existing product features.
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