Level Color Change Proposal

A 6 color viridis palette might look something like:


Which looks pretty good to me, and yeah it’s one of the more colorblind friendly gradients

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If you want to stick to specific colours for the website (aka “corporate identity”) you could choose a light to dark gradient in the same colour and/or - if the site supports it - use a pattern. For example, light blue → dark blue, but the darkening is done by adding dots. no dots = easy, full dark colour = hard; and in between the colour gets darker because the number of dots increases.

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It does look good on that palette, but when I apply it to the site, there are some issues:

As you can see, the yellow doesn’t look great on the tan background. And, more generally, I think a gradient does have some issues when you look at the gallery. Since temporary gradings are slightly lightened, it looks like a bit of a mess. And it’s just hard to tell things a part.

Some of this is due to my development environment not having a full search database, so there’s a lot more temporary graded items… but still, this may need more thought then I’d have liked. :confused:

Not exactly sure what you mean. You mean like a Pointillism painting? Not entirely sure how i’d do that.

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I think it’s counter intuitive to have yellow easier than green. Not much better than random, non-gradient, colors (as long as the pallet is still color blind friendly). And you have to make sure that each color is memorable on it’s own, without being shown next to the other colors. I’m not sure this pallet is good for that.

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Yeah definitely (and that one poses a different accessibility problem as it’s almost certainly way too low of a contrast). And as @bbo mentioned yellow being easier than green doesn’t make intuitive sense. Could always chop out the yellow and add the black to the top end hardest difficulty which then gives you sort of three distinct groupings: two greens for N5/N4, two blues for N3/N2, and then dark purple/black for N1/N1+. Might not solve the other problems the screenshots show though.

The exact colors aren’t necessarily important either (avoiding red is what makes viridis work from a colorblindness perspective), so you could always pick your own greens/blues/purples that go well with the background and you’ll have something that should be fairly colorblind friendly.

This is a fair point, and going to be hard to achieve with any gradient (almost by definition)

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Sorry, I am bad at explaining. We used to do this for charts in case someone printed a presentation in black and white.
Basically something like this, the bigger the dots (or the more dots there are) the darker it looks. However, after seeing the screenshots… with the writing, it would probably be too busy to be read well. so, never mind :smiley:

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I think that changing it is fine (or keeping it is fine), but I beg of you…let’s choose a better color palette that can progress. The jump from the brighter blue with no hints of purple directly into the purple directly into red directly into black is quite stark. If we’re gonna jump like that, I think we could probably just stick to the original because the colors manage to complement each other better.

(if you were to use black, what if it was just a label for explicit/NSFW reads or audiovisuals? because I’m sure somebody will submit material with that eventually. And then anybody, including potential minors on the site, could avoid it if they wanted to.)

:sweat_smile:

To be fair it’s clearly labeled.

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someone (cough me cough) already did… it gets a “mature content” warning in the information. And I think Brandon would not show the cover, if it were explicit. :see_no_evil:

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I threw the new color scheme into a colorblindness simulator (they’re not perfect, I know), and the colors look reasonably distinguishable to me at total red/green colorblindness, but the gradient no longer works, and it may be hard to see some against the site background:
index
I would also vote against having it end in black. Partially because I think it looks really ugly :sweat_smile: but in addition, white text on a black background can be hard for people to read. For instance, it can cause ‘ghosting’ for some people with astigmatism.

Colorbrewer has a variety of color schemes, including gradients, and it has an option for only seeing colorblind-friendly combinations. There seem to be a variety of options for a gradient with six members. Maybe one of them would work?

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What about a settings option in the account that allows you to choose between different palettes?

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I guess I’m one of the few who actually liked the color scheme as it currently is… :sweat_smile: Having all of the groupings labeled with distinct colors gives you an easy name to reference each group instead of calling them by the JLPT levels which are mere guidelines. I think most of us would avoid referring to the current purple grouping as the “N3 books” since many of the books in that group may be much easier or harder for someone who specifically studied for the N3 exam (unless they are graded readers intended for that level). Plus, I think it’s much less awkward than having to call them the “L20-26 books” whenever you want to talk about them. Maybe I’m just overly attached to trivial details but I’ve already started mentally associating certain books with the color groupings.

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and then there’s me, who didn’t know what on earth people were talking about with the term “purple levels” until this thread popped up. It was only when I saw the chart at the top of this thread that I realized there were colors in the number circles on my dashboard and finally understood the phrase. I’m not colorblind btw, just clueless.

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lol I didn’t even know that there were any on the website lol :joy: Is it something we can filter out of searches? I haven’t seen any, but maybe it’s because im ignoring a particular level of books.

Same! I was just coming to mention that because I remembered watching a video about accessible web design…I haven’t had to mention anything about epilepsy because there doesn’t seem to be any motion/motion-inducing aspects on the website. Should ads/gifs eventually be added, then I would propose that there be the option to only allow them to “flicker”/play upon interaction/hovering.

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I’m also guilty as charged. In my case, I have mentioned in the notes that it contains adult content when I added it, which ended up on the book page.

I don’t think you can filter for those at the moment. I am planning to give it the TL tag when I reorganize my books. Maybe that’s something that will be searchable in the future.

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Ngl, I don’t think this is an optimal place to have that lol. Especially considering that it wasn’t bolded/capitalized and it’s in an area that most people are going to gloss over. I had to stare at the page for a bit to even process it’s there. So I’d say that there still may need to be a separate little banner or something to go alongside the difficulty level banner. That, or it needs to be made to actually grab your eye.

Screen Shot 2022-06-24 at 7.41.10 PM

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I do my best to clearly call out content warnings in my reviews. Also, because a good deal of what I read is darker subject matter I make a point to clarify if it’s consensual or not.

Here are two examples: モテ薬 review, スマホを落としただけなのに review

As to level - the only book in the “N3/Intermediate” range I recall with adult content is Dear Friends which I admittedly both read and reviewed quite some time ago (I read it maybe a year before Natively came online?). I don’t imagine there is anything in the beginner ratings that would qualify excepting audiovisual which isn’t on the site yet.

…But I also submitted 18+ content for the initial database seed soooooo. Yes. Filters, tags, clear markins, etc would all be good.

Edit: I didn’t realize or perhaps forgot there was something that also displayed on the book page :sweat_smile: I don’t think I ever note it when adding a book, aside from one book I hesitated to submit at all and that warning wasn’t for sexual themes but for another topic entirely

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let’s move this conversation to the Product Updates & Casual Natively Discussion :slight_smile:

… and stay on the color change proposal here.

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Ah! But there was a connection to color changes that I forgot to post in my previous message (got distracted while typing…)
I was the part about

To me, that makes a lot of sense and it allows you to have this information at a glance without needing an extra :underage: marker (which might add clutter)
I think it’s an appropriate “you’ve been warned” color… as long as there isn’t anything else that looks black to colorblind people in whatever color palette you end up using.

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Eh, I think I like an extra marker. Level colors are too important.

I think by default 18+ content will be filtered out (that’s what sites like AniList do)… so it’s not like we need super big markers for it. It’d only be surfaced to people who explicitly want that content.

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