When I first started the Great Pattern Reformatting back in 2020, usability and accessibility were my primary aims. And that included making my patterns colourblind friendly.
This wasn’t a difficult switch for me – due to my own neurodivergences I find colour in knitting patterns distracting and/or confusing – I’ve never understood the need for a red box to outline a repeat on a chart, for instance. The use of a coloured font, especially if there’s a lack of contrast, causes me eye strain on top of confusion. So aiming for a colourblind friendly format made sense.
Yet I’m not colourblind myself, and there are many different types of colourblindness! So which should I choose, and how should I present my patterns and charts?
The most straightforward option for me was to stick to greyscale. I’ve since been told this is a common preference amongst folk with Autism/ADHD/Dyslexia when it comes to making things easier to read in the absence of colour – probably because colour impacts us in different ways.
I only had a few patterns to rechart, colourwork patterns, and I opted for grey and white squares with sufficient contrast.
Any patterns that use 3 or more colours – there isn’t sufficient range in the shades of white to dark grey to determine 3 different colours on a chart! – I opted to use symbols to represent a colour. My colourwork patterns are primarily stocking stitch or garter stitch, and occassionally some corrugated ribbing, so this method avoids any concern about mixing colour and symbols.
Charts are not the only area where I’ve turned my attentions. My written instructions also include no colour in them, they never have for reasons mentioned above, and any schematics are also in greyscale only.
Elsewhere, besides the pattern photos and the back page, there is no use of colour at all.
The premium tutorials, that are linked within each pattern, include greyscale step-by-step images, photographed in high contrast yarns to ensure that the steps and detail are still clear once converted to greyscale.
This is one of the brilliant things about universal design – aiming for greyscale to help colourblind knitters also helps knitters who print their patterns but want to avoid the costs of printing in colour. (I’ll talk more about printer friendly and low-bandwidth friendly patterns next!)
At the time of posting only one eBook remains with coloured charts – Lateralis. I need to rephotograph this collection and until I’m able to do that, I can’t justify the cost of having the eBook reformatted only to do it again. The single patterns from this collection are, however, in greyscale.
I’ll update this post once that collection is done!
I hope this helps explain how I’ve approached colourblind accessibility within my patterns.
And if you’d like to try a sample pattern, you can download the Meret for free to see if my pattern writing style suits you 🙂
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