[R] palettes for the color-blind

Max Kuhn mxkuhn at gmail.com
Wed Nov 2 22:26:49 CET 2011


Everyone,

I'm working with scatter plots with different colored symbols (via
lattice). I'm currently using these colors for points and lines:

col1 <- c(rgb(1, 0, 0), rgb(0, 0, 1),
         rgb(0, 1, 0),
         rgb(0.55482458, 0.40350876, 0.04166666),
         rgb(0, 0, 0))
plot(seq(along = col1), pch = 16, col = col1, cex = 1.5)

I'm also using these with transparency (alpha between .5-.8 depending
on the number of points).

I'd like to make sure that these colors are interpretable by the color
bind. Doing a little looking around, this might be a good palette:

col2 <- c(rgb(0,         0.4470588, 0.6980392),
          rgb(0.8352941, 0.3686275, 0,       ),
          rgb(0.8000000, 0.4745098, 0.6549020),
          rgb(0.1686275, 0.6235294, 0.4705882),
          rgb(0.9019608, 0.6235294, 0.0000000))

plot(seq(along = col2), pch = 16, col = col2, cex = 1.5)

but to be honest, I'd like to use something a little more vibrant.

First, can anyone verify that these the colors in col2 are
differentiable to someone who is color blind?

Second, are there any other specific palettes that can be recommended?
How do the RColorBrewer palettes rate in this respect?

Thanks,

Max



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