ACM Accessibility Recommendations for Publishing in Color

The most accessible approach would be to ensure that your article is still readable when printed in greyscale. The most notable reasons for this are:

The most common type of inherited Color Vision Deficiency (CVD) is red-green (in which similar-brightness colors that only differ in their amounts of red or green are often confused), and it affects up to 8% of males and 0.5% of females of Northern European descent.
The most common type of acquired Color Vision Deficiency (CVD) is blue-yellow (including mild cases for many older adults).
Most printing is in Black & White.
Situational impairments (e.g., bright sunlight shining on a mobile screen) tend to reduce the entire color gamut, reducing color discriminability.

NOTE: It is NOT safe to encode information using only variations in color (i.e., only differences in hue and/or saturation), as there is bound to be someone affected!

To ensure that you are using the most accessible colors, ACM recommends that you choose sets of colors to help ensure suitable variations in Black & White using either of the following tools:

ColourBrewer: http://colorbrewer2.org/
ACE: The Accessible Colour Evaluator: http://daprlab.com/ace/ for designing WCAG 2.0 compliant palettes.