As a colour blind person I appreciate the attempt, but this system does absolutely nothing to help me. The kind of place where my colour blindness is an issue, would be a map like this one http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/jeoparmap.jpg... where Trebekkies and Casual kibitzers are the exact same colour to me. Go ahead and label them as `/ and / in the legend, it doesn't help me in the slightest to determine where I need to go in the US to engage in a lively conversation about Jeopardy.
To really help people with colour blindness, I recommend that before you publish anything, do this to it. http://erik.wiffin.com/stuff/graymap.jpg If you can see the difference between all of the categories, then so can I.
I'm not color blind, and those two colors on the Jeopardy map are nearly indistinguishable -- the same hue, differing only slightly in value and saturation. It is a terrible choice of colors.
Wow, on my monitor one is red and the other is clearly brown. They're not really close.
Edit: After a quick look in an image editor, I can see that only the red channel is significantly different. This changed the value somewhat, but had hardly any effect on hue or saturation. I guess my monitor is over-emphasizing this difference.
I'm red-green colorblind, and the best color-based systems have a few things in common:
1) High contrast colors
2) Unique icons assigned per color
3) They use traditional color intensity conventions
Usually, I can differentiate red and green by using intensity conventions. Red should be dark, and green should be bright. Visual cues help too: emergency colors should be red and white no matter what the object is. Interestingly, I can't tell blue, purple, and pink apart to save my own life.
To me, the system presented in the article is more-or-less garbage, since it doesn't provide an orientation and doesn't put any constraints on the contrast difference between the presented colors. I might get it right, but I'd waste a lot of time compared to a well-defined contrast system
I would most easily identify a system using black, white, light gray, dark red, bright green, and blue. Anything past that, and I'd start to have some problems. Pink might look like blue, yellow might look like bright green, brown might look like red, etc.
Sometimes I get false positives using my system: 3 years ago I found out that the Canadian flag is red and white, and not green and white. My friends and I were celebrating Canada Day as an excuse to have a party (nothing personal, Canada!), and I was explaining my color differentiation system, and very strongly asserted that the Canadian flag is green and white because it had a leaf. They spent a few moments exchanging "Is he serious? Because he looks serious" glances before spending a good 15 minutes openly mocking me.
I'm also red-green colourblind, but it sounds like you've got it much worse than I do. I've never found that intensity conventions are all that helpful. When I was younger, I was consistently under the impression that purple was just "dark blue".
In defense of the Canadian flag, leaves turn red in the fall. Not that that helps in intuitively knowing what colour it is though.
James Clark Maxwell came up with an ingenious (if perhaps impractical) workaround to colourblindness. If you cannot distinguish between red and green (common case), then use glasses with one green tinted lens and one red tinted lens. By obscuring alternate eyes, you will be able to differentiate the colours.
edit: note that it is a little impractical to wear silly glasses
nice, but orange and green are only distinguishable if you know the orientation. so the wrist tags used in the example are orange/green ambiguous (i think there might be some text below that provides a baseline, but it's very difficult to see in the photos and shouldn't be necessary).
it wouldn't be quite as pretty if it was asymmetric, but it would remove that problem and so be easier to use.
To really help people with colour blindness, I recommend that before you publish anything, do this to it. http://erik.wiffin.com/stuff/graymap.jpg If you can see the difference between all of the categories, then so can I.