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Letter of Recommendation: Color Blind Pal

23 points by skilled 8y ago

FPGAhacker 8y ago
I tried the app. Maybe I’m just tired, but I could not find a setting where it actually helped me distinguish anything. It made things worse every time I tried shifting. I’m red green colorblind, but don’t know or recall if it’s red deficient or green or both. Neither setting on the app helped me. As for simulation, I’ve never found one where I couldn’t see the difference between simulated and normal. That just means that their adjustment is not perfectly aligned with my deficiency. I just mention it so you with more normal color vision don’t take these simulations as a golden reference. They should be seen more as a hint of what it is like.
- yorwba 8y ago
  Such an app would probably need a training phase where you have to specify which colors look identical to you, so that the adjustment can be optimized for your personal color curves.
  - russfink 8y ago
    I love your idea. Could someone please make an app that incorporates training, both to benefit the user and to compensate for the specific device that is running the app? Like many others here, I work in a technical professional capacity. We are tasked with preparing engineering analyses, presentations, and splash sheets that discuss our ideas. As a reviewer for some of these documents, I often challenge people to consider the use of color and how it expresses on black and white prints. If we had a reliable app for this, I could extend my recommendations to ensure that color printed materials appear correctly to people who have trouble seeing or differentiating colors. It would add a new dimension of accessibility into the products we create.
    - FPGAhacker 8y ago
      colors will never appear correctly to someone with color deficiency. The information is lost, not translated. The best you can hope to do (short of altering eyeballs) is to make sure colors are differentiated in the perception of a color deficient person. Beyond just seeing a difference side by side, in many cases such as charts, one needs to be able to look at a color splotch at one part of a chart and be able to recognize it in another. This is harder than side by side diffentiation. For many colors that are as different as black and white to normally sighted persons, those same colors might as well be very slightly different shades of the same color. So in a grayscale chart with overlapping lines, it’s hard for anyone to distinguish small differences in shades, so people used unique symbols to differentiate them. That’s still the most reliable way to help colorblind people. Don’t solely rely on color. Augment with patterns and symbols when you can.
- jmiserez 8y ago
  A problem is that smartphone camera sensors just aren't good at picking up colors exactly. White balance seriously affects the result, e.g. right now it's showing a white sheet of paper as "faint orange" (outside with overcast sky, i.e ideal lighting). And with dark colors, the result is strongly affected by noise, especially for short exposure times. Maybe the results could be improved by using raw sensor data and longer exposure times?
dcminter 8y ago
The glasses mentioned in passing here really do seem to be effective for some people so they're well worth investigating if the price is manageable. To quote an acquaintance who started using them a year or two back: "... it's like seeing an electric sign turned off (colorblind) VS turned on (with my glasses)" and from recent posts on Facebook he's clearly getting a huge amount of value from them. My understanding of the mechanism is that they suppress the wavelengths that the other receptors are strong in so that the weaker receptors have more of an influence. Presumably they therefore can't help true dichromats. Doubtless others here know and can explain more.

23 points by skilled 8y ago

I tried the app. Maybe I’m just tired, but I could not find a setting where it actually helped me distinguish anything. It made things worse every time I tried shifting. I’m red green colorblind, but don’t know or recall if it’s red deficient or green or both. Neither setting on the app helped me. As for simulation, I’ve never found one where I couldn’t see the difference between simulated and normal. That just means that their adjustment is not perfectly aligned with my deficiency. I just mention it so you with more normal color vision don’t take these simulations as a golden reference. They should be seen more as a hint of what it is like.

yorwba 8y ago
Such an app would probably need a training phase where you have to specify which colors look identical to you, so that the adjustment can be optimized for your personal color curves.
- russfink 8y ago
  I love your idea. Could someone please make an app that incorporates training, both to benefit the user and to compensate for the specific device that is running the app? Like many others here, I work in a technical professional capacity. We are tasked with preparing engineering analyses, presentations, and splash sheets that discuss our ideas. As a reviewer for some of these documents, I often challenge people to consider the use of color and how it expresses on black and white prints. If we had a reliable app for this, I could extend my recommendations to ensure that color printed materials appear correctly to people who have trouble seeing or differentiating colors. It would add a new dimension of accessibility into the products we create.
  - FPGAhacker 8y ago
    colors will never appear correctly to someone with color deficiency. The information is lost, not translated. The best you can hope to do (short of altering eyeballs) is to make sure colors are differentiated in the perception of a color deficient person. Beyond just seeing a difference side by side, in many cases such as charts, one needs to be able to look at a color splotch at one part of a chart and be able to recognize it in another. This is harder than side by side diffentiation. For many colors that are as different as black and white to normally sighted persons, those same colors might as well be very slightly different shades of the same color. So in a grayscale chart with overlapping lines, it’s hard for anyone to distinguish small differences in shades, so people used unique symbols to differentiate them. That’s still the most reliable way to help colorblind people. Don’t solely rely on color. Augment with patterns and symbols when you can.
jmiserez 8y ago
A problem is that smartphone camera sensors just aren't good at picking up colors exactly. White balance seriously affects the result, e.g. right now it's showing a white sheet of paper as "faint orange" (outside with overcast sky, i.e ideal lighting). And with dark colors, the result is strongly affected by noise, especially for short exposure times. Maybe the results could be improved by using raw sensor data and longer exposure times?

dcminter 8y ago

The glasses mentioned in passing here really do seem to be effective for some people so they're well worth investigating if the price is manageable. To quote an acquaintance who started using them a year or two back: "... it's like seeing an electric sign turned off (colorblind) VS turned on (with my glasses)" and from recent posts on Facebook he's clearly getting a huge amount of value from them. My understanding of the mechanism is that they suppress the wavelengths that the other receptors are strong in so that the weaker receptors have more of an influence. Presumably they therefore can't help true dichromats. Doubtless others here know and can explain more.