Palettes compatible with colour blindness

Colour palettes recommended for use with colour blind audiences.

cbPalette8

cbPalette13

cbPalette15

Format

Character vectors of lengths 8, 13 and 15.

An object of class character of length 8.

An object of class character of length 13.

An object of class character of length 15.

Source

• cbPalette8: Wong B. 2011. Color blindness. Nat. Methods. 8:441. doi:10.1038/nmeth.1618

• cbPalette15: https://mk.bcgsc.ca/biovis2012/color-blindness-palette.png

Details

cbPalette15 is a Brewer palette. Because colours 4 and 7 are difficult to distinguish from colours 13 and 3, respectively, in individuals with tritanopia, cbPalette13 omits these colours (i.e. cbPalette13 <- cbPalette15[-c(4, 7)]).

See also

Since R 4.0, cbPalette8 is available in base R as palette.colors(8).

PlotTools implements improved palettes with 12, 15 and 24 colours.

Examples

data("cbPalette8")
plot.new()
plot.window(xlim = c(1, 16), ylim = c(0, 3))
text(1:8 * 2, 3, 1:8, col = cbPalette8)
points(1:8 * 2, rep(2, 8), col = cbPalette8, pch = 15)

data("cbPalette15")
text(1:15, 1, col = cbPalette15)
text(c(4, 7), 1, "[   ]")
points(1:15, rep(0, 15), col = cbPalette15, pch = 15)