Begging for mercy from the financial press

Dear financial press,

Please have mercy on us color blind folks. Is it too much to ask that your charts use colors that are clearly distinct? I once failed a chemistry lab because I couldn’t see the goop on the microscope slide turn from pink to purple. Like there is a difference to us color challenged?

Red, green, yellow lines- all just look like a kid was drawing scribbling lines to us. Even when lines are labeled, we’re lost after two series cross. Red and blue are hard to decipher if the screen is off or the printing is off. They key is to use colors that dramatically contrast to a degree where color is nearly irrelevant. Bright red and green can just be bright lines, but a blue line and a light green line are different in intensity/brightness/contrast and can almost always be deciphered by all but the worst colorblind cases.

Sincerely,

A Few Percent of the Population

ps.

And “magenta”- whatever the hell that is- is really just a joke to us.

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