Colorblind: Checking figure accessibility for colour blind people • Hacker News Board

Re: Colorblind: Checking figure accessibility for colour blind people

#11

Post by y1n0 » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

qwe----3 wrote: post #4

Can a colorblind person remap colors on their own screen?

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.

Re: Colorblind: Checking figure accessibility for colour blind people

#12

Post by AlotOfReading » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:43 AM UTC

y1n0 wrote: post #10

gcanyon wrote: post #9

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/id69311…

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 thes…

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.

Re: Colorblind: Checking figure accessibility for colour blind people

#13

Post by Terr_ » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 2:17 AM UTC

razorbeamz wrote: post #7

chaps wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Colorblind: Checking figure accessibility for colour blind people

#14

Post by razorbeamz » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 4:00 AM UTC

y1n0 wrote: post #10

gcanyon wrote: post #9

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/id69311…

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 thes…

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