Ask DLS: Web browsing for the color blind

by Christina Clark Jul 17th 2008

Remember when your less than cool cousin started blogging and used black text on a background covered in multi-colored flames? And you shortly developed a headache, not only from the content but from squinting and tilting your head to the side just so you could sort of read the text. If you are color blind your every day web browsing might be a bit like this as well.

DLS reader, Eric, sent us a question, wondering if there was anything out there to help color blind web surfers see things, like weather maps, a little bit more clearly. "Like 8-10% of males, I have a degree of red-green colorblindness. Unfortunately, many web designers do not take this group into account when designing web sites and applications. This leaves many features most people enjoy daily unusable or at least hard to read for people with this condition" Eric says.

The simply named Colorblind Web Page Filter may be a solution. It's not fancy and it's still in development stages, but if you type in a URL and pick your color filter (red/green colorblind, grayscale, etc.) according to the type of colorblindness you have it will load up a page that you can hopefully read a little bit better than that white text over kittens. If not, break out the 3D glasses to really spice things up!

[Thanks, Eric]

Tags: browser tools, colorblind, plugins

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

gnome said 9:36AM on 7-18-2008

Thanks for the info. This looks like a good start, but now I need to run off to work on my white-text-over-kittens killer app. :-)

Christina Clark said 11:34AM on 7-18-2008

Make sure you send us a tip for that one! We'll definitely want to write about it.

MikeSims said 2:06PM on 7-18-2008

You can also check out VisCheck. They also have a plugin for photoshop so you can check comps

gnome said 4:02PM on 7-18-2008

One that looks very useful is called EyePilot, that does transformations of colors through a "window frame" you drag over the app you want to see better.

http://www.colorhelper.com

$35, but may be worth it if it works as advertised

Christina Clark said 4:03PM on 7-18-2008

Looks cool. Let us know if you try it out.

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