Color Blindness and HP Prime keys color choice

[Ben Fairbank]

I, too, am slightly colorblind (deuteranomalous) and also have trouble with the keys. BUT I do not think the difficulty is entirely attributable to the colorblindness. My education included a lot of study of human vision, and one of the solidly established bedrock observations of visual researchers (specifically, sensory psychophysiology) is that for a contour to be usefully visible, there must be a brightness (or luminance) difference between visual stimuli on the two sides of the contour. A mere color (wavelength) difference is not sufficient to sustain a contour. When I look at the Prime keys in marginal lighting I have a lot of trouble with the (orange) letters on the (light gray) number keys. Why is it hard to see them? Not, I think because of my colorblindness, but because the brightness of the orange and the gray are almost the same, making it difficult for the visual system to maintain the perception of the contour and so see the letters. This is basic, level one, elementary stuff to a human factors engineer, and why HP did not run the keyboard by a human factors engineer I cannot fathom. Or maybe they did so and chose to ignore their opinion...