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I know that my phone has a "low power mode" which turns everything greyscale. Many phones have a "low-light reading mode" as well that turns warmer colors. I wonder how difficult it might be to have color blind mode for specific types of blindness? Might be interesting to UX designers


On iOS, Settings/General/Accessibility/Display Accomodations/Color Filters. There even filters for specific types of color deficiency, or modify to taste.

A lot of video games have filters now for things like friendly/enemy tags and such.


I use Android.


For Android Simulate color space is the option in the Developer options.

If you don't have developer options enabled you need to tap on the "Build number" 10 times in the "About phone" settings to enable it on Android.


On my Android phone: settings->developer options->advanced->simulate color space, which has simulation of 4 varieties of colorblindness. Developer options has to be enabled by finding the kernel build number in the "About" page of settings, and tapping on it about 7 times.

Separately, I've got a "Night Mode" setting, which lets me set a schedule and a color temperature to use.


> Separately, I've got a "Night Mode" setting, which lets me set a schedule and a color temperature to use.

What a dream. May I ask what Android version you're on? On 8.1.0 it's not there.

EDIT: will not work on 5X, only on Pixel devices...


I've got a wileyfox (s2) and it's one of the options on there? If not there's apps for it, I remember seeing something on f-droid for it, but since it's built in I don't use it.


Yup, there are apps on f-droid but they (Red Moon) suck because they're just an overlay that kills all blacks.


7.0, on a couple year-old HTC. Thanks for reminding me...HTC seems to have stopped security updates at the 2 year mark. It's probably time to look into running LineageOS on the sucker.


> my phone has a "low power mode" which turns everything greyscale

Why do grey pixels consume less power than red pixels of the same brightness?

In fact, assuming (maybe wrongly) that your phone screen's colors are created from RGB, CMYK or some other combination of primary color 'dots' in each pixel, grey would require lighting all the dots in a pixel, while 'redscale' would limit power usage to 1/3 or 1/4 of the dots. I realize there are many other issues potentially involved, but perhaps someone could explain.

EDIT: Sorry, the correct terminology of 'dots' and pixels is lost in my brain someplace and I don't have time to find it.


Maybe it's an issue of LCD backlighting?

The backlight has to be strong enough to supply the highest R,G, or B value, while the lower values have light blocked off (by polarization) and turned into heat.

When the LCD display shades of grey, the RGB values are more likely to be in tandem, so maybe you can get the same final brightness coming out with fewer photons being overproduced at the start.


Display technologies that light up are all based on RGB, as far as I know (additive color). Printers and such, which use subtractive color, would use CMYK.

What takes more power depends on the hardware. An OLED display would take more power to light up a pixel than to keep it dark. An LCD display would typically take slightly more power to show a dark color. The backlight is always shining (which takes most of the power), but darkening an LCD pixel takes more power than just letting the light through does.

Maybe the actual power savings would come from lighter rendering calculations (only having to calculate a single color channel)?


This exists in Android. Greyscale mode is implemented with the very same color-shifting functionality.

It's usually under Developer Options.


I've used Sim Daltonism[0] for some stuff at work. I've only used the Mac version, but looks like there is an iOS version, as well.

[0] https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/




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