UNO releases a color-blind-friendly deck →

This is great. Hundreds of millions of people have some form of color blindness (primarily red/green) around the world, so this makes a lot of sense.

At first I thought the triangular symbols for red and blue were too similar, but the ColorADD standard's logo (and Code page) demonstrates how they can be additively combined to create the symbol for the complementary color purple. Clever, and better than no symbol at all.

Co.Design spoke with Ray Alder, Mattel's Senior Director of Global Games, about the new deck, and asked about adding the symbols to the main deck:

For now, the color-blind-cognizant version of Uno is only available on Uno’s website. It’s being treated as something of an experiment–Mattel doesn’t know what level of demand to expect. But if truly inclusive design is the goal, there’s no reason that the ColorADD version of Uno couldn’t just become the main version of Uno.

“We’ll still have classic Uno. This is a separate version–as we do those many other versions. We’ll see the response, and it could be something we do in our everyday pack,” says Alder. “I think for us, Uno is doing so well, that we don’t want to take changing the regular deck lightly. We want to be really careful with it . . . and there is a deck for everybody.“

Take the distracting ColorADD logo off the back of each card, mention color blindness on the regular packaging, possibly de-emphasize or remove the symbols from the central oval of the Wild card (it's already visually distinct), run a bunch of usability tests, and I imagine this would be ready to become the new normal deck without taking anything away from the experience of non-color-blind users.