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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I love this idea, but sadly it's not for me. I tried this on my phone (going grayscale) and turned it off after 1/2 a day. Too many apps rely on color to differentiate different parts of the app.

It definitely gave me a greater appreciation for the plight of the colorblind, and it's why for my own company's products, we always test in B&W, to make sure no functionality is lost.

Relatedly, does anyone have any links to some good research on why this works?

Edit: OP has pointed out that this tool lets you choose sites to have in color or grayscale, so that's a bit of a game changer, as on the phone it was all or nothing.

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Why go grayscale? Is there any data to support the claims made by the extension? (see below)

The extension linked says:

> Can't stop surfing the web? You may not realize it, but all of that color is designed to hijack your brain and keep you browsing.

> You'll soon find that time wasting sites hold your attention less, and this will hopefully help you focus on whatever it is you really need to be doing.

I hadn't done any scientific studies, just had read about it and decided to give it a try on my phone. It made a difference for me, so I wanted to make something for chrome since as a dev I spend most of my day on there.

I'd say it's worth a try at least to see if you see a difference. It's strange browsing without color, and when you use grayscale and go back to color it almost feels overwhelming.

Here are some articles though that go into it more:

http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-...

https://blog.mozilla.org/internetcitizen/2018/02/13/grayscal...

This makes me wonder: what if instead of converting everything to grayscale, you swap color channels. I'm sure that would make images less appealing (e.g. human skin color would become something completely different), but still you'd be able to distinguish colors, so functionality isn't lost. Also, black and white, and grayscale stays the same, so text remains readable.

This is easily done, you can create an index for each color or color range.

Additionally, you can mess with the typical B&W conversion weights for each channel.

However this got me thinking, what do we want when we convert an image to bw? It's a pretty hard problem, because we want both semantic segmentation and preserving lightness. Also you clearly can't have a one-to-one mapping when you lose 2 dimensions. Of course in the case of a simple UI that's not a problem, but with photography it is.

I work for a university making some of their websites ADA compliant. Simulating several different colorblindnesses is part of doing so. It always surprises me how even universities can be up-to-date with accessibility but sites as popular as Facebook or google can fail many of the checks we do.

It must have to do with the university receiving federal funds..

As a red/green colorblind the only thing that I hate when people mess up are charts, never had a problem with everything else

The irony about Facebook is that Marl Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind.

There's very little irony in that. Zuckerberg made Facebook for others to use; not for himself (OK, for himself, but not for himself to use it). This just underlines that further.

Yup. Also, we maybe so dopamine sound-, color- & effects-addicted that we’ll subconsciously make any excuse to keep the glowing box neck hunched over. Even street signs to watch for oblivious pedestrians on smartphones, as well as signal-lit crosswalks so pedestrians never have to look up.

I feel you. I tried to make it easy to toggle on and off in case you needed to check something in color, but it's a bit of a double edged sword in that it can be too easy to turn it off and leave it off.

That's a big part of why I added the saved/excluded sites functionality, so you could add it for sites that are usually time wasters like reddit or facebook, or exclude sites from being gray that you need for work.

This is a good point. On the phone it was all or nothing. Here I can choose. So maybe I will give it another try!

Newer Android phones allow you to set an accessibility menu shortcut. If you only have one menu item selected, the shortcut just toggles that menu item. I press vol-up & power to toggle greyscale.

I'm not sure what kind of phone you have, but on an iPhone you can set your phone to toggle B&W and normal color by triple clicking the home button.

I have an iPhone and didn't realize this. Thanks!

I just installed it and liking it so far.

I had the same issue with the all-or-nothing phone experience because of maps that I use everyday for traffic.

I'm liking this so far.

Thanks!

By the way, for the phone thing I had the same issue. If you have an iPhone, you can set it so triple clicking the home button toggles it - https://lifehacker.com/change-your-screen-to-grayscale-to-co...

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