2008 Volume 35 Issue 2 Pages 193-201
This study investigated the visibility of character colors in connection with background colors. Each subject observed the randomly assigned text whose background and character colors were chosen from the eight basic colors, i.e., black, blue, cyan, green, magenta, red, white, and yellow, on a plasma display, and rated how easy it was to see it on a five-point rating scale. A maximum likelihood asymmetric multidimensional scaling was applied to the data, and the four-dimensional Okada and Imaizumi's (1987) model was found to be the optimal model. As a result of the weighted orthogonal Procrustes rotation, the symmetric part of the optimal model was congruent with the Euclidean distance in the dimensionally shrunk or expanded YUV color space with the additional dimension on which red, magenta, green, and cyan were opposite to the others. As regards the skew-symmetric part, magenta and blue were shown to match the character colors better than the background colors.
