Colorblind: Checking figure accessibility for colour blind people | Hacker News Reader

Colorblind: Checking figure accessibility for colour blind people

quantixed.org

13 pointssebg13 comments

For anyone working on a Mac, I highly recommend Sim Daltonism. It gives you an interactive display on your Mac that you can place over any section of your screen to simulate what it looks like to a colorblind person. It simulates several different types of colorblindness. I have a friend who is colorblind, and to the best of our mutual understanding, it is accurate.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sim-daltonism/id693112260

Thanks for the recommendation. I tried it out as a colorblind person. I'm always looking for one of two things -- tools that will help me differentiate stuff I see on graphs and charts (endlessly frustrating) and tools that will let me show other people how I see.

My problem is that I've never found a colorblind emulator that matches my colorblindness. I'm just red-green deficient, so nothing exotic.

My test for these emulators is whether I see a difference between the original unmodified image and the emulated colorblind image, and I always do. Even with this one. So that tells me that the emulation doesn't really match what I personally see or I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

I haven't used sim daltonism, but most of these simulators assume your opsins are fully non-functional. You usually have multiple copies of the relevant genes and most of them need to be non-functional for complete colorblindness. Most people are only partially colorblind as a result, from what I understand.

Additionally, mutations can shift your spectral sensitivity curves away from "human normal", which further affects color perception.

The thing is though, no two people's colorblindness is exactly the same, so this is difficult to tune.

As someone who is colorblind, I recommend testing accessibility with grayscale.

If it works in grayscale, it should work for basically all colorblindness types.

Neat but still hard for me (red/green) to differentiate colors between some. The Merge + Tubulin one in particular.

Can a colorblind person remap colors on their own screen?

We can, yes. But then everything looks weird. :)

Yeah, some non-colorblind people mistakenly think we can "fix" it by mapping trouble colors to different colors because they fundamentally misunderstand that we always see like this.

I expect doing this well requires the underlying system to somehow have a clear differentiation between whether a color is mapped to the natural world or not.

In other words, colors assigned to good/warn/error icons can be shifted almost arbitrarily as long as they are consistent over time for one person, but it backfires if you're doing the same shift for colors in a picture of a tree's spring/autumn/fall leaves.

Yes, and mac has various filters under accessibility for various types of colorblindness. I alternate between basically all of them at different times because none work for me in all situations. People are always sharing graphs or charts and invariably there will be some that I either can't distinguish or that I simply can't match up with the legend.

Remapping is a correct term but it might imply simple substitution to some people. Really what needs to happen is a distortion of the spectrum, squeezing the spectrum away from trouble zones.

Something similar is sometimes done with hearing aids. Frequency shifting and compression to try to fit audio into areas the consumer can still hear ok.

The problem in both cases is it makes things look and sound weird and sometimes unintelligible because the brain hasn't learned how to interpret things at these other frequencies.

Why does this single headline use two different spellings for the word colo(u)r?

Because the author is making a reference to a song with the title "Colorblind", as explained in the footnote:

> The post title comes from “Colorblind” by Super Furry Animals, a B-side to their Do Or Die single.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com