Note that most modern palettes are designed with various forms of color blindness in mind. For that purpose, they artificially restrict the range of colors, which in turn reduces the visual information they can carry for the vast majority of people who have normal color vision.
I'd be super interested to see a study that examines how color blindness-aware design affects people without color blindness. Such design often completely avoids red hues, which are of huge importance as visual cues to normally sighted people. It's hard to imagine this doesn't have a negative impact somehow, yet I've never seen this discussed anywhere.
My subjective experience is that good color palettes don't have too many colors anyway. Colorblind-friendliness tends to mean avoiding pairs of complementary colors that don't necessarily convey information well anyway.
Remember that we are talking about data visualization, not color palettes in general. Red is not particularly important in data viz.
Consider that many non-color-blind Dota players use the colorblind settings because they like the colors better.
Traditionally, red is used to indicate problematic or dangerous values. This is backed up by a long cultural history, at least in the Western cultural context, that associates red with danger.
I'd say this fact alone makes the color red extremely important in data visualization. The current trend of "but some people can't see red, so let's just use yellow and blue everywhere" seems utterly inadequate for addressing both the importance of red and the problem of color blindness.
They're designed with color blindness in mind for good reason. Prevalence in males is between 5-10% but in my experience it's higher in software industry, for whatever reason.
Of course restricting available colors affects the diversity of palettes, but often designs can accommodate both handily.
It's nearly 2023 and many, many charts are interactive. There's little excuse to at least having a color blind mode be opt-in for such things. If we're all looking at charts on our personal devices, then local accomodations render your entire argument moot.
Where is the research to back this up? While I've seen tons of articles that go into great detail on how to simulate and accommodate various forms of colorblindness, the idea that those accommodations have no negative impact on the rest of the population appears to be taken as an axiom that somehow requires no data to support it.
Most charts don't have a ton of data. Choosing four accessible colors is not challenging. Most UIs are monochromatic.
I'm not sure I need data, most interfaces or designs you see already accommodate color blindness via simplicity. Those that do not can almost always do so by adjusting the palette subtly, with almost no perceptual difference for those who are not colorblind.
Obviously simulating colorblindness on a general graphics level is less effective, and I don't think anyone is suggesting we apply such filters universally.
The center of my argument is that it is easy with software, which has consumed the information world, to simply offer alternative viewing modes, of which colorblind modes are not very complicated.
Aren't something like 1 in 20 or so people color blind? I'd hardly consider that as an edge case. That's roughly the odds of being over 6ft tall in the US.
This is ignorant and wrong. You are assuming that colorblind-friendly palettes are worse than others, but that isn't the case. In my experience, colorblind-friendly palettes actually tend to be nicer looking.
It's not wrongthink, but you might just be a jerk.
I'd be super interested to see a study that examines how color blindness-aware design affects people without color blindness. Such design often completely avoids red hues, which are of huge importance as visual cues to normally sighted people. It's hard to imagine this doesn't have a negative impact somehow, yet I've never seen this discussed anywhere.