Repel visually similar colors away for colorblind users in various plots
For work (single cell RNA-seq) I make and look at countless scatterplots. Though most packages attempt to be colorblind-aware, I always find results uninterpretable when over a handful of colors are used. scatterHatch, adding different hatch patterns to clusters on top of colors, helps, but perhaps a simpler solution can be found -- avoid using visually similar colors next to each other (ie. on a UMAP, neighboring clusters should never be orange and yellow).
- extract colors from plot object or just use a desired vector of colors
- generate distance matrix of categories (clusters on 2D plot, group on other types of plots)
- generate distance matrix of colors, after conversion to CIELab space (and possibly various colorblindness conversion functions)
- find optimal assignments of color to above groups/clusters to avoid plotting visually similar colors near each other
- recolor
devtools::install_github("https://github.com/raysinensis/color_repel")
library(colorrepel)
a <- Seurat::DimPlot(so, group.by = "type", pt.size = 0.5)
b <- a + scale_color_manual(values = color_repel(a, sim = colorspace::tritan))
cowplot::plot_grid(a, b,
labels = c("original", "color_repel"))
