
Letter of Recommendation: Color Blind Pal - skilled
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-color-blind-pal.html
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FPGAhacker
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.

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yorwba
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.

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russfink
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.

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FPGAhacker
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.

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dcminter
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.

