GUI design for color blindness

Question

It is common to represent status of an item in a GUI using the colors: red, yellow, green, to mean error, warning, and OK (or something equivalent). However, 7-10% of men have difficulty distinguishing between red and green because of color blindness.

So far I've looked at Color Scheme Designer which simulates how people with different color blindnesses would perceive a set of colors, but I'm interested in hearing how you have approached this problem and how successful it was.

Answer 1

Don't depend on the colours. You could apply symbols too (e.g. green tick, yellow triangle, red hexagon) or use text labels.