Syntax Coloring: Is it harder for color-blind coders to program?

If you're really curious, look at

http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/2A.html

Very few colorblind people are monochromatic (totally colorblind). Most colorblindness falls into the category protanopia or deuteranopia, which can see yellows and blues and browns. So syntax coloring can get set to those. Most of them have a hard time seeing light green, which looks orange, etc.

I am colorblind, red-green deficiencies (protanopes and deutanopes). I have never had any trouble with syntax highlighting, that I have noticed anyway. :)

Most syntax highlighting is configurable.

Certainly nobody should deliberately make life harder on colorblind people, but they've been managing to work around such issues for their whole lives. I've seen some cut and paste into non-color highlighting text editors. I've also seen that they tend to be more familiar with how to configure color highlighting that most people.

In vi, I use

:syn off

when someone discovers a truly horrid highlighting scheme.

If you want to get a feel for how color schemes might appear to the color blind, http://colorschemedesigner.com/ simulates several different colorblind models of perception.