Olive Green

[buzz]

The SYO BBQ featured another excellent urban race on one of the specially surveyed maps - many thanks to the mappers and planners for a great event.

The map used the sprint race specification. This takes some getting used to in particular the need to identify where you can and can't run, but the combination of new and old symbols all seem very sensible except for the use of olive green for private land / out of bounds.

Most colour-blind people (around 7% of male population) are unable to distinguish between yellow and olive green. Standard maps make use of yellow and green by the IOF recommended greens have just enough blue in them to make them stand out on properly printed maps (not so good on home printers). Unfortunately no shades of olive green appear to be easily distinguished from yellow.

The fact that olive green is used to show out of bounds areas, makes the choice of colours even more unfortunate as they are more significant in route choice terms than slow-run/walk colours, and can lead to competitors accidentally straying out of bounds and putting future use in jeapordy.

Any of the 7% have similar problems? Any suggestions on how to get this changed? It would be such an easy improvement to make.

[graeme]

You wont get it changed.

When I started making urban maps (before sprint and ISSOM) I used white for OOB
and various greens for woods. When there's a lot of OOB, its a lot clearer, and a lot cheaper on the printer ink too. Experienced orienteers sometimes had trouble stayng out of the white, but it was more obvious to newcomers. I'm still tempted to stick with this convention, but I dont have the confidence...

[Red Adder]

I'm doing a local event around an area with lots of kidney shaped estatelets indispesed with heath / woodland , some rather brambly . [The area has lots of features and paths so it is still a reasonable challenge]. Olive green overpowered the map and the "official" alternate of black stripes blended with the green stripes of the bramble to make the map virtually unreadable. With my usual distain for the Map Group I've used a grey screen - we have no areas of bare rock on any of our maps so it won't really confuse - and it stands out clearly from the areas of normal run. In fact given that the built environment looks a bit like bare rock (to pigeons and peregrine falcons as well) perhaps there is further logic in my approaoch.

[buzz]

[quote="graeme"]You wont get it changed. quote]

I do like a challenge!