Image Correction for Color Blindness | Hacker News Reader

Image Correction for Color Blindness

vischeck.com

46 pointsJaruzel19 comments

I'm pretty color deficient. I have trouble reading charts and graphs. Anything I make that's color coded uses vastly different color so that at least I can tell them apart. My UI/UX portfolio is "unique" to say the least.

Subtle differences in color impossible. Can I tell the difference from Salmon or Melon? no way.

Consequently I have developed a much different relationship to color than most. I tend to ignore it mostly. eg: My friend came to visit me in NYC and asked which train to take into Manhattan, I told him "Take the Q" and he said "the yellow train?" I realized that he had never really looked at the letters I had never really looked at the colors.

I still have the same "emotional response" to color (i associate green with life) but I have trouble with the informational side.

One last anecdote, my first "tech job" was tech support for Adobe Acrobat in the early 2000's. It was right when a great deal of the printing industry was switching to PDF's. Periodically I would get the calls related to color correction, and I was generally no help as I couldn't tell which color profile was making the print out too green.

I, too, am severely chromatographically challenged.

At a former employer, I wound up being a part-time guinea pig for our UX staff - to the best of my knowledge, we were the only major SCADA player to have dedicated GUI colour schemes for colour deficients.

The downside? A number of phone calls to our support hotline made by customers who had accidentally switched to, say, the tritanopia-optimized palette. They generally went along the lines of "Geez, did you guys hire some colour-blind dimwit to do your displays?" -"Matter of fact, we did." -"Oh."

We recently had a look at these palettes:

* Article: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/colorblind/

* 7-color palette: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/colorblind/img/colorblindness.palettes...

* 12-color palette: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/colorblind/img/colorblindness.palettes...

* 15-color palette: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/colorblind/img/colorblindness.palettes...

Can you or the grandparent elaborate whether they are working for you?

We always try to combine color with an icon, e.g. green - check vs red - X, so that people having problems with colors are able to differentiate.

Yes, it's best to avoid using color alone.

From the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): "1.4.1 Use of Color: Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element." [0]

BTW despite the name, the WCAG are useful for non-web design.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/#visual-audio...

I am tritanope, with a (very mild) deuteranopia on top for good measure.

The 7-colour palette works well - I can see seven separate hues (well, eight if you count the black.) The hardest ones to tell apart are the vermillion and reddish purple - I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference unless I had both in front of me simultaneously.

The 12- and 15-colour palettes don't do much for me.

Kudos for not using colour as the only cue!

I can tell the Bluish Green from Reddish Purple if they are side by side, but in isolation, I wouldn’t know which was which.

This is on the 7 color scheme. I didn’t look at the others.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned CubeHelix -- https://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/ -- which, as I understand it has the property of "working" just as well in grayscale. Handy not only for color blindness but for grayscale printouts of images featuring color. There is support out there for D3 and various other visualization systems.

Site author here - AMA (except why we haven't updated it in 10 years... ) Also - check out our other site : www.tinyeyes.com

www.tinyeyes.com made me open my eyes when I became a parent.

Then you'll like these: VR: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/video/2017/apr/11/f...

Podcast: https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2017/apr/11/first-...

This site isn't resolving for me and neither is www.tinyeyes.com. I don't get any error, just Chrome spinning and saying "Waiting for www.tinyeyes.com", same with vischeck.com.

Sorry about that - it will come up eventually - it's being hit pretty hard right now. There's a cache here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

There is a setting in the Android Developer options to simulate different kinds of color blindness live on anything displayed on screen. It's called "Simulate color space" and has 4 different settings (monochromacy, deuteranomaly, protanomaly and trianomaly).

For me the Enchroma glasses made the world more colorful (now I understand why they're called high-visibility jackets). But they don't have a huge effect.

I previously used a chrome extension which supports 9 different settings to simulate different kind of color blindness.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spectrum/ofclemegk...

I first heard about the Daltonize filter when I was working on Call of Duty. A large percentage of the Call of Duty audience is male, and by association a lot of the players are colorblind, so making the game colorblind friendly was important. This blog post by one of Activison central tech's technical directors has some interesting thoughts about colorblind filters http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2013/02/color-blindness.html?m=...

Another useful tool is Sim Daltonism (https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/). I always try to spot-check figures I'm making for scientific publications to ensure that I'm not excluding too many of my readers from being able to understand key points.

why does this is to me invisible http://www.vischeck.com/images/ishihara_45.jpg

but I can see the different colours here http://www.vischeck.com/images/oranges_small.jpg ?

If you can't see the number 45 in the first image you probably do have red/green colorblindness. But you can still see the other color dimension (blue/yellow) just fine - so most likely you are seeing some but not all of the colors in the second image.

The first is an actual test meaning it's meant for someone who is colorblind to fail. The second is an example that some of those that failed the test, would have problems seeing.

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