To be honest, the accessibility controls that operating systems and apps have built in to help colorblind people have been largely inadequate, because what people with normal color vision think is the problem, and what colorblind people experience as the problem are not the same thing.

There are controls to change the contrast of websites, but the problem is the browser interface itself, not the websites.

I would prefer to see the native interfaces of websites and not change them, and to use browser extensions to modify the individual few I have problems with.

But for Firefox it used to be very easy to change the color of basically any interface elements, so the themes worked really well. And (and I know this is surprising) it used to be possible to show text labels for buttons, like "Back", "Forward", "Home", and "Reload", and being colorblind, I depended really heavily on those. I understood that most people used the icons, but those labels really helped me.

Also, the tendency of everyone to make all buttons circular REALLY made it much more difficult for me to use interfaces, because I would identify buttons by their shapes, and the circular buttons and lack of straight borders between colors made it difficult to tell whether there was actually any color difference at all.

To explain color vision, your eye looks at a given color, and there's a type of cell that's meant for that specific color. That cell sees that color and tells your brain "I see that color there!" So your brain will look at blue and the "blue" cells tell your brain that they're seeing blue.

There are three main types of these cells: one for reds, one for greens, and one for blues. What happens when two different types are going off at the same time? That's how your brain sees other colors like orange and purple and yellow; they're combinations.

For most colorblind people, either red is reduced or missing or green is reduced or missing. In very few cases, the blue may be reduced or missing or might see no colors at all.

For me, I have reduced red vision. I see certain specific reds, but others, no.

So colorblind people have reduced ability to distinguish colors. For any two colors, we have the best chance at distinguishing colors when there are:

1. significant color contrast between the two colors

2. large areas of both colors

3. clear, straight separations between the two colors

4. no translucency for either color

5. no "liquid" or "flowy" colors, and no gradients or watermarks

And when the user has to deal with multiple buttons, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of allowing the user to have different shapes on a consistent color background. A circle/square-with-rounded-corners with a colored background DIRECTLY INTERFERES with colorblind people's ability to distinguish the shape of the icon in front of the square.

Apple has been particularly bad about this. The icons of macOS and iOS are all square, and for colorblind people, that adds in another color that can potentially be confused for the content of the icon itself. So instead of trying to just distinguish the icon from what's behind it, now I have to try to distinguish the icon from the color of the rounded square behind it or the color of the circle behind it AND ALSO the color of the background behind it.

Website developers started making their icons perfectly square or perfectly circular, and for people who have trouble differentiating color, the lack of shapes basically destroyed the ability to quickly identify the difference between the icons when switching between tabs.

Apple's browser Safari is by far the worst offender in this. Speaking as a colorblind user, it's basically unusable. It's a nightmare. I hate even opening that program.

And they started doing things like centering the addresses in the address bar. That's fine, but just as an exercise, imagine that you're looking at a monochrome interface(no colors), and you have trouble differentiating between colors. If you start centering the content of text fields in a monochrome interface, to people with normal color vision, that looks like centered text within the field. But to people who have trouble telling the difference between colors, that centered text doesn't look centered on anything. It looks like the text placement is completely arbitrary and random and that it jumps around and changes when you click on it. And since it's no longer centered, it's not possible for the colorblind person to easily tell where the beginning of the text field is.

And grouping similar buttons together into a single physical button sounds like a great idea if you can tell the difference between them. But for colorblind people, the ability to separate them would be something I could appreciate, so at least I could go "I need to click the fifth button,"(or could READ THE TEXT LABELS THAT USED TO BE AVAILABLE) instead of having to compare the buttons literally every time I have to click any of them.

I literally identify the icon for Safari by thinking "circle within a square". And the searching for sometimes up to a whole minute to identify which of the almost-identical-to-me icons is Safari.

And Firefox is piling it on, doing things like Apple.

I am not saying that everyone should be forced to use browsers like me, but the very first browser interfaces, while not very pretty, were actually pretty usable for me: large navigation buttons, clear labels, sharp square text fields, lots of padding between buttons and other elements, larger text, yeah. I am all for allowing other people to have their modern interfaces and everything, but the literal very first browsers were much more usable for colorblind people.

Netscape Navigator 1 was released in 1994. Here is a picture.

In many respects, this browser has a significantly easier to use interface for colorblind people. I know that current browsers have a lot more features and buttons and widgets, and I like them. Tabbed browsing(and particular vertical tree-style tabs) have been a game changer for me. A lot of feature improvements have been made in browsing, but in that same time, colorblind people have been kind of the redheaded stepchildren of interface design. Very often, when a new feature has been added for the general population, it's been added in such a way to make the interface very significantly worse for colorblind people. And the features that have been added to supposedly help colorblind people have added really minimal help at all. Things like "inverting colors" make things appear unnatural. Things like "Reduce transparency" help very slightly. The things that would actually help are in a very simple list near the top of these comments. And browser manufacturers are all hilarious in that the only difference allowed between different browser profiles is the color of the window or a colored dot overlaid on the icon.

A very sincere thank you to anyone who's read all of this. I know that it's a lot, and you didn't have to read it. No one with any pull at any of the major operating system companies and browser companies seems to care at all(including Google and Microsoft and Mozilla, but most notably, APPLE).

And now that that's over, to continue on my tangent, while I'm at it, I filed a bug report LITERALLY nearly 30 years ago to ask Apple to allow me to make the "X", "-", and "+" buttons permanently visible in the window controls on macOS, instead of just visible on hover. Or hell, how about allowing me to specify the color of the red activity indicators on icons so that I can actually notice them and so that my coworkers don't think I'm ignoring them when I'm not responding to chat messages? Literally all I asked was to be able to specify the color of the app icons' activity indicators. Instead of a red dot, how about a yellow dot? How about letting me make it bigger? How about making that bounce or maybe move in a circular pattern around the edge of the icon(or hell, maybe it would be cool to have the whole app icon spin)? I mean, throw me a bone here, Apple.

Please, Mozilla, don't copy Apple on this. Please think about colorblind people. Nobody else seems to.