Support for color-blind users#46

Adjust the contrast of your color bars and charts so that color-impaired customers can see them.

I’ve been using your PRO service for several years, and I remarked to a co-worker that the tool would be far more useful if the charts were color-coded.

“They ARE color-coded” was her response!”

I checked the underlying HTML – sure enough, one bar was coded #ba3737 and another was coded #4da74d (They look exactly the same to me, though.)

Today, there are more than 3 million color-impaired people.
Making Uptime Robot more useful to us would take a minor CSS tweak.

How about it?

Charles Jackson
FUJIFILM SonoSite

Hi Charles! Thank you for the suggestion. I guess you are talking about “wep app” interface, right? We are aware of this issue and I totally agree with you. We have some plans with the web app.

However, untill we will update the web app, I would like to point you to our mobile app available on iOS and Android. It has support for color-blind users and I think you gonna love the app!

If there is anything else you want to share with us, just reply back.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.uptimerobot&hl=en_US&gl=US
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/uptimerobot-monitor-anything/id1104878581

Accessibility is an important component of any app. If you have 10 people on your team, chances are excellent that color notifications will be useless for at least one of them. Making the colors accessible to your customers is extremely simple. (My teams routinely adjust CSS color issues – it is considered “WebDev 101”). Looking at your code, I see the color values are hard-coded into the HTML – not in a CSS – so it may take a few moments longer to address.
Please don’t send me to an app. I cannot copy/paste from an app. I cannot easily import report data from an app into my other workspaces. An app might be adequate for casually monitoring your kid’s soccer website, but not at all suitable for integrating with reporting tools.
I’m sorry to say this, but if your team of engineers cannot support your flagship web site with a pretty trivial accessibility issue (for a paying customer, no less), then I am extremely hesitant to try another UptimeRobot offering, such as an app.
Sorry for sounding harsh, but for an accessibilty issue that can be so quickly fixed, I was expecting a “Fixed” or “Fix Is Coming Soon” response. I was not expecting the issue to be reclassified as an “Idea” wiith an upsell to an app that I can’t use.

This was brought up on Discourse in discussion https://discord.com/channels/1073550286163021854/1118993578962726944/1118993578962726944 .

I will add here my comments from that chat:

I 100% support not relying on colour. I do want to note though, that even for red green colour blindness there are variations and using a different red or green may not help.
A visual indicator like [|……||||] (where outages are not full bars) or an option to use completely different colours would be more involved but help circumvent the colour issue.

I am very happy to hear that the accessibility issue will be addressed.
To address some of the comments in this thread - -

• I’n previous projects, we’ve adjusted the contrast of the colors to assist in differentiating them. Once the colors “look different” from one another, the interface becomes usable. (In my case, the bottom light on a traffic signal appears pure white. The traffic signal is usable to me because the white at the bottom is quite different from the red or yellow.)

• Our primary use for UptimeRobot is to monitor a number of our FUJIFILM corporate websites. Web engineers here are not issued cellphones (and it is against company policy to conduct business on personal devices). So we need to use the web interface.
  Personally, I like the web interface, as it is very simple to copy/paste reports into other documents.

I’d be happy to help beta-test the color-revised version of the web interface.

Thanks