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Sim Daltonism: The color blindness simulator

michelf.ca

11–20 of 22 posts

Re: Sim Daltonism: The color blindness simulator

#12
post #9

Tangential: I've been playing around with the color blindness filters on my iPhone, and the grayscale filter had me thinking for a moment. I've set it to 50%, set up the accessibility shortcut (triple-click on the home button) to toggle it, and found myself using my phone with the filter on basically 99% of the time. It's been a couple of months, and I've noticed that the oversaturated colors were making me slightly…

I bet there's a way to accomplish what you're looking for with ICC profiles. They allow arbitrary functions and LUTs in addition to standard matrix math. There's typically a way to set this for your OS, an individual image, and I'm pretty sure an individual app as well (but I'd imagine only your own).

Edit: Actually, this may not be editable on iOS, but it is on macOS, Windows, probably Linux, and it looks like Android too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile

Re: Sim Daltonism: The color blindness simulator

#13

I’ll highlight a note from the developer: Sim Daltonism lets you see through the eyes of someone with a color blindness. While the colors shown are a good approximation of what a color blind person would see, you should not expect them to be perfect. Everyone has his own perception of colors that differs slightly from other people, and color blindness are often partial at different degrees. More importantly, cameras…

What would “close to what it’s like” entail exactly? Would it mean that when you look at a simulation of the effects of your colorblindness, you see zero change from the unaltered view? Or would it mean that it looks absolutely nothing like what you see because it’s transforming the base image by clamping the input colors to what you can see, and stretching that decimated color space out over the entire range of norm…

> Would it mean that when you look at a simulation of the effects of your colorblindness, you see zero change from the unaltered view?

Ideally, yes. Although it's unlikely to match any one person's exact colour vision.

If you look at filtered images side-by-side, say from this collection on bored panda[1], to me the deutran images and the normal image are pretty much indistinguishable, while the protan image is close but slightly too green.

> Or would it mean that it looks absolutely nothing like what you see because it’s transforming the base image by clamping the input colors to what you can see, and stretching that decimated color space out over the entire range of normal sensitivity?

That's how most "colour blind filters" look in practice, yes. I don't think a lot of folks are setting up the transform correctly (or they are just straight-up using a colourblindness preview filter as if it were a colourblindness correction filter).

[1]: https://www.boredpanda.com/different-types-color-blindness-p...

Re: Sim Daltonism: The color blindness simulator

#16

I’ll highlight a note from the developer: Sim Daltonism lets you see through the eyes of someone with a color blindness. While the colors shown are a good approximation of what a color blind person would see, you should not expect them to be perfect. Everyone has his own perception of colors that differs slightly from other people, and color blindness are often partial at different degrees. More importantly, cameras…

I have always felt the same way - this article at The Verge is the only thing I’ve ever thought has gotten close:

https://www.theverge.com/23650428/colorblindness-design-ui-a...

Re: Sim Daltonism: The color blindness simulator

#17
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds more useful, cheers. I wonder why they haven't made it a non hidden option.

It's annoying enough (especially as a child at school, but not at all exclusively) to be colourblind and put up with 'so what colour is this' without people waving their phone around exclaiming about how it says you see things, thanks.

Sure, but at the same time, it's a useful tool to show people how unusable their ui is using something they already have.

The problem with “what colour is this? what colour is that?” is not the question, it's that the question comes up with an expectation of an answer, regardless of the context. If I'm _never_ willing to answer the annoying question, that makes me the asshole regardless of how poor my colour vision is.

Re: Sim Daltonism: The color blindness simulator

#19

I’ll highlight a note from the developer: Sim Daltonism lets you see through the eyes of someone with a color blindness. While the colors shown are a good approximation of what a color blind person would see, you should not expect them to be perfect. Everyone has his own perception of colors that differs slightly from other people, and color blindness are often partial at different degrees. More importantly, cameras…

Part of it may be the display technology, rather than what the software thinks should look right.

Those RGB pixels are chosen and tuned to trick a certain homo sapiens baseline setup of chemical sensors neurological weighing of sensor inputs. Light from natural source is dramatically more-varied.

Re: Sim Daltonism: The color blindness simulator

#20
post #9

Tangential: I've been playing around with the color blindness filters on my iPhone, and the grayscale filter had me thinking for a moment. I've set it to 50%, set up the accessibility shortcut (triple-click on the home button) to toggle it, and found myself using my phone with the filter on basically 99% of the time. It's been a couple of months, and I've noticed that the oversaturated colors were making me slightly…

You can do this on Android as well (manufacturer results may vary...)

This is on Android 14, but I initially turned it on in an earlier version: 1. unlock the Developer options (you can search this; depends on OS version) 2. in Developer options, scroll down to "simulate color space", choose grayscale 3. back to main settings --> Accessibility --> advanced, there is an "accessibility button" option 4. set that to "color correction"

Now I have a small icon (looks like a person) that I can use to toggle monochrome. Indeed it was someone I heard on a train who had this turned on for iPhone as described above for the same reason ("lowers the dopamine response", he explained to the conductor) that intrigued me into looking into it

Samsung also has a decent automation infrastructure ("modes and routines"), so I set that up to automatically disable the color correction / grayscale in certain apps (camera, photos, maps, etc.)

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