Chapter 6 — Practice-on-your-own hints

Color, Type, and Accessibility: Visual Rhetoric • Companion page • Last updated 2026-07-18

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Short diagnostic hints for the two Practice on your own problems in this chapter. Attempt each problem before opening the hint. Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.

Problem 1 — the red-green status chart

Restated: A support-ops dashboard uses red / yellow / green cells to mark SLA status across 40 service categories. Red-green color-vision deficiency affects about 8% of men of European descent, with prevalence varying by population. Name the specific failure this encoding creates, and rewrite the encoding so the meaning survives without losing the color-coded scan.

Show a diagnostic hint

Diagnostic cue. Ask whether the status encoding remains distinguishable without color, then add a redundant cue where it does not.

Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.

Problem 2 — the heatmap with divergent data

Restated: A finance chart uses a sequential (light-to-dark blue) palette to show revenue variance from plan, where the data ranges from −30% to +40%. Name the palette-type mismatch and the one-sentence Refine direction that fixes it. Include which color at zero.

Show a diagnostic hint

Diagnostic cue. Match the palette type to the data's order and center before evaluating chart polish.

Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.

Related on this site

About the three-tier Practice format

Each chapter of the book closes with a three-tier Practice block adapted from Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s course-adoption pattern in Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice!: Practice with us (one worked problem with full solution in the book), Practice on your own (open problems with complete answers in Appendix G of the Practice Workbook; this page offers short diagnostic hints), and Practice at work (an open-ended prompt to apply the chapter’s move to a live artifact). This page hosts the middle tier.