Colorblind-friendly palettes in Matplotlib - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Colorblind-friendly palettes

📖 Scenario: You are working on a data visualization project. You want to make sure your charts are easy to understand for everyone, including people who are colorblind. Using colorblind-friendly palettes helps make your visuals clear and accessible.

🎯 Goal: Create a simple bar chart using a colorblind-friendly palette from matplotlib. You will first set up the data, then choose the palette, apply it to the bars, and finally display the chart.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called fruits with these exact entries: 'Apples': 10, 'Bananas': 15, 'Cherries': 7, 'Dates': 12

Create a variable called palette and set it to the colorblind-friendly palette 'tab10' from matplotlib

Use a for loop with variables fruit, count to iterate over fruits.items() and plot bars with colors from palette

Use plt.show() to display the bar chart

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Colorblind-friendly palettes help make charts readable for people with color vision differences, improving accessibility in reports and presentations.

💼 Career

Data scientists and analysts must create visuals that communicate clearly to all audiences, including those with colorblindness.

1

DATA SETUP: Create the fruit count dictionary

Create a dictionary called fruits with these exact entries: 'Apples': 10, 'Bananas': 15, 'Cherries': 7, 'Dates': 12.

Matplotlib

# Create the fruits dictionary with counts
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create the dictionary with the exact fruit names and counts.

2

CONFIGURATION: Set the colorblind-friendly palette

Import matplotlib.pyplot as plt. Then create a variable called palette and set it to the colorblind-friendly palette 'tab10' from matplotlib.

Matplotlib

fruits = {'Apples': 10, 'Bananas': 15, 'Cherries': 7, 'Dates': 12}
# Import matplotlib.pyplot as plt and set palette to 'tab10'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use plt.get_cmap('tab10') to get the colorblind-friendly palette.

3

CORE LOGIC: Plot bars using the colorblind-friendly palette

Use a for loop with variables fruit and count to iterate over fruits.items(). Plot bars with plt.bar() using colors from palette by indexing with the loop index.

Matplotlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fruits = {'Apples': 10, 'Bananas': 15, 'Cherries': 7, 'Dates': 12}

palette = plt.get_cmap('tab10')

# Use a for loop to plot bars with colors from palette
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use enumerate(fruits.items()) to get the index i and the fruit and count. Use palette(i / (len(fruits) - 1)) for the bar color.

4

OUTPUT: Display the bar chart

Use plt.show() to display the bar chart with the colorblind-friendly palette applied.

Matplotlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fruits = {'Apples': 10, 'Bananas': 15, 'Cherries': 7, 'Dates': 12}

palette = plt.get_cmap('tab10')

for i, (fruit, count) in enumerate(fruits.items()):
    plt.bar(fruit, count, color=palette(i / (len(fruits) - 1)))

# Display the plot
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Call plt.show() to open the window with the bar chart.