Breaking characters into components is one of the best ways to learn them, and many apps help by highlighting the parts. The common implementation, coloring each component a different hue, is also a quiet accessibility failure: if you are color-blind, the highlighting that is supposed to help you is exactly the thing you cannot use. This is worth getting right, so here is what accessible component highlighting should do, and where we honestly stand.

Why color-only highlighting excludes people

Color vision deficiency is common, affecting a notable share of the population and especially men. When an app distinguishes a character’s components purely by color, red radical, green phonetic, blue extra, a color-blind learner sees a muddy, indistinguishable blob. The feature does not just degrade for them; it disappears.

This is a specific case of a general accessibility rule: never use color as the only way to convey meaning. It is one of the most basic and most frequently broken guidelines in app design.

What accessible highlighting looks like

Good component highlighting conveys structure through more than one channel, so it works regardless of color perception:

  • Outlines or separation. Draw boxes or gaps around components so they are visually distinct by shape, not just fill.
  • Labels or numbers. Tag each component, or number them in stroke-order sequence.
  • Patterns and contrast. If color is used, pair it with distinct patterns or strong contrast, so hue is a bonus, not a requirement.
  • Toggle and reveal. Let users step through components one at a time rather than relying on simultaneous color separation.

The principle is simple: someone who sees no color at all should still be able to tell the parts apart. Understanding components matters because that is where meaning and sound live, as we cover in which part of a character holds its meaning and which part hints at its sound.

Where Hanzi Write Practice stands, honestly

Hanzi Write Practice does not currently offer a dedicated color-blind-friendly component highlighter. It is honest to say that is not a feature today, rather than imply an accessibility capability we have not built. The app’s core is from-memory writing on a practice grid, where you reconstruct characters as components through the act of writing, see learning to write Chinese characters from memory.

Accessibility needs like this are precisely the kind of thing early-access feedback should drive, because the right answer comes from people who actually need it, not from assumptions. If color-blind-safe highlighting matters to you, telling us is the most useful thing you can do.

Join early access and help us build it accessibly from the start.