20 iPhone Apps for the Color Blind

Tools 6 Comments

Even if you are suffering from color blindness the iPhone can be used as your little helper tool. Different developers had a look into this niche and developed some nice Apps specially designed to help colorblind people or to educate the ones which don’t know how this looks and feels like.

Having a closer look into the different Apps designed around color vision deficiency I found 5 types or categories which can be used to describe them. Most helpers can be found in the group of ColorNaming. But there are also some interesting tools around CVD Simulation or even CVD Compensation/Daltonizing.

  • ColorNaming: Name a color from an image or the live picture while usually pointing to it. Some even speak the color or use some special algorithms to get the best fit. There is also a huge range in available color names.
  • CVDSimulation: Simulate the different types of color vision deficiency. This is similar to my online tool Coblis — Color Blindness Simulator.
  • CVDCompensation: In some form try to help colorblind people by adjusting certain colors so you can recognize them. Some even use some enhanced algorithms known as Daltonize.
  • MatchingColors: Find colors on a picture which match to the one you chose.
  • ColorHarmonies: Find harmonizing colors. This is certainly a perfect guide for all of us color blind, when we try to find an outfit that fits together!

I suppose HueVue: Colorblind Tools needs to be mentioned specially, as this is the only App which includes not only all of those five categories but it also the only one which tries to give some hints in color harmonies! And on top of that it’s even free to use. So if you have a look into those tools don’t miss that one.

Personally I don’t have an iPhone and didn’t test any of those Apps. So the descriptions are taken from the Apps pages and just altered to fit in. If you have any experience with one or even some of those Apps, please share your knowledge with us in the comments section.

HueVue: Colorblind Tools

HueVue: Colorblind Tools
by AppFoundry (Free App)

HueVue is a color tool for the iPhone that helps people with color vision deficiencies (commonly referred to as color blindness) to identify, match and coordinate colors. If you or someone you know has trouble with colors, or if you’re interested in a cool color identification, matching and coordination tool, then HueVue is for you!

Type: ColorNaming, CVDSimulation, ColorHarmonies, CVDCompensation, MatchingColors
ColorBlinds Easy

ColorBlinds Easy
by R2Pro BV

ColorBlinds Easy is the easy to use tool to help you as a colorblind person to distinguish colors and gain understanding and respect from family and friends for your color deficit by simulation. Daltonize is a method to improve contrast between red and green and with Simulate you can show your family and friends what your world looks like.

Type: CVDSimulation, CVDCompensation

Colorblind Helper

Colorblind Helper
by Zip Zest

Colorblind? Unsure or confused about the color of things. Quickly find out what colors others see and what they call them with Colorblind Helper. With its simple and easy to use interface there’s no more wondering whether you’re wearing a green tie with a red shirt, or a green tie with a green shirt.

Type: ColorNaming, MatchingColors

Chromatic Vision Simulator

Chromatic Vision Simulator
by Kazunori Asada (Free App)

The “Chromatic Vision Simulator” is a chromatic simulation tool. It makes a simulated video of each chromatic from the built-in camera and shows you how people with a specific type of color vision deficiency is seeing the world and this in real-time.

Type: CVDSimulation

Colorblind Vision

Colorblind Vision
by opcoders.com

Transform your iPhone into a real-time color blindness vision device! This app simulates the most severe color vision deficiencies. It’s all in real-time. Just launch the app and look at the world around you through your iPhone. You will experience how red and green colors all becomes yellow and brown.

Type: CVDSimulation

Chromatic Glass

Chromatic Glass
by Kazunori Asada (Free App)

“Chromatic Glass” divides the color spectrum into segments so that such colors do not overlap depending on the type of color deficiency a user suffers from. It adjusts lightness and chromaticity of color segments in real-time to further help users to identify colors.

Type: CVDCompensation

Color Blind Aid

Color Blind Aid
by iDisrupt.com

The Color Blind Aid iPhone app enables people with red-green color blindness to detect red and green in their environment and pass color blindness tests in real-time using augmented reality technology. Adjust sensitivity of red or green detection for indoor, outdoor, virbrant, dull, or test conditions.

Type: CVDCompensation

Colorblind

Colorblind
by ChewSoft

Colorblind is a game that challenges your ability to memorize and create colors. The premise of the game is simple; after being shown a color, and you must reproduce it. You have a series of ‘lifelines’ at your disposal that add to your strategy…but in the end…only you can determine whether or not you are truly ‘Colorblind’.

Type: Game

Kolorami

Kolorami
by Comparatel (Free App)

Kolorami analyses colours of a picture for the pleasure or to help partially sighted persons. Regular mode uses the camera to analyse the colors of what is in its visual field. The other mode ‘Screenshots ‘ allows you to reach photographs or screenshots stored in the library, to analyse colors.

Type: ColorNaming

Colorblind Assistant

iSpectrum Color Blind Assistant
by Wishbone Apps

Colorblind? You are not alone! Nearly one in twelve men, and one in one hundred women are colorblind. But you’re in luck: iSpectrum quickly and easily identifies any color by name! Simply touch your photo wherever you need to know the color and shake your device to reveal the RGB (Red/Green/Blue) components of any color.

Type: ColorNaming

ColorBlind Assistant

ColorBlind Assistant
by Brook Seaton

Use your iPhone or iPod Touch’s photo library to quickly identify colors. Quickly draw a circle around the test area. The app performs the following:
– identifies the hue, saturation and lightness
– percentage of the test area
– highlights the identified pixels

Type: ColorNaming

Color Reader

Color Reader
by IRLMobile Software (Free App)

Color Reader is an innovative concept allowing the user to “touch” camera live video to know the color of something. This is a fantastic way for people who are color blind to check colors. This app has been especially designed using the iPhone accessibilities feature.

Type: ColorNaming

Say Color

Say Color
by HotPaw Productions (Free App)

Speaks the name of the nearest color in the center of a camera preview pane using speech synthesis. If you lock the exposure and color balance while aiming at something medium neutral gray under your current scene’s lighting, the color naming scheme will be more accurately centered in the RGB gamut.

Type: ColorNaming

ColorIn

ColorIn
by Stephen Sullivan (Free App)

ColorIn detects colors with the iPhone camera. Simply point your camera and take a picture and ColorIn will tell you what the most dominant color is for that part of your image.


Type: ColorNaming

Colorblind Avenger

Colorblind Avenger
by Brian Wardle

The perfect tool for anyone who is colorblind. Now you’ll be able to identify the color of anything just by taking a picture of it with your iPhone! Touch anywhere on the image to see the color of that area. Displays color names and shades as well as rgb decimal and hex values. Designed to be quick and easy to use!

Type: ColorNaming

Color Curious

Color Curious
by Vais Salikhov

Ever looked at something and wandered what color it is? Want to know what name best describes the color you see – or the color you cannot see due to color blindness? Whether you are simply curious, or truly unable to perceive differences between certain colors, Color Curious is for you.

Type: ColorNaming

ColorHelper

ColorHelper
by Svep Design Center AB

ColorHelper is a small utility designed with the colorblind in mind, but its also of use for anyone interested in knowing the RGB color value for a specific spot in an image. Choose an existing photo or take a photo with the built-in camera, and select a spot where you would like to know the color value.

Type: ColorNaming

ColorBlind Suite

ColorBlind Suite
by Threeplicate

This application helps you find colors in real-time (augmented-reality) from your iPhone’s camera or photos in your library. There are two modes:
– Live Mode: Play with images directly coming from your iPhone’s camera
– Static Mode: Use images from your photo library or take a new photo

Type: ColorNaming

ColorDetect

ColorDetect
by sunset software Ltd Liab. Co

The ColorDetect iPhone app gives you the possibility to detect colors in real time using augmented reality technology. The name and the RGB values of the detected colors are displayed in real time on the user interface. ColorDetect detects the colors with a 5 point detection algorithm to improve the detection quality.

Type: ColorNaming

aidColors

aidColors
by Tilenus Consultores, S.L.

aidColors is an application that allows visually impaired to identify the color of things. Also can be a funny game for children. aidColors allows to perform an easy and fast color recognition by means of the iPhone camera.

Type: ColorNaming

Can You Spot the Red Berries?

Pics 15 Comments

Richard, a friend of mine from Great Britain, took this very nice winter picture which he sent to me. He was outside to catch the fresh snow on the trees. And well, he didn’t really realize what different colors he caught on the picture as he is also colorblind.

Picture taken by Richard Healy

Only when somebody told him, he was able to spot the red berries!

Can you see the red berries on the tree or not? — You could also use this beautiful winter shot as a simple color blindness test. I’m red-blind and definitely can’t see them.

Online Pseudoisochromatic Plates Color Vision Test

Tests 5 Comments

Pseudoisochromatic plates are the most well known type of color blindness test. The dotted pictures are often referred to as Ishihara plates, becuase Dr. Ishihara developed the first set of such plates which were used all around the world to test for color vision deficiency.

There are many different versions and varieties of pseudoisochromatic plates tests available. Usually they are used as printed tests because it is crucial to get the colors right. Slight changes of the used colors can alter the result and would make a test unreliable. This is also the reason why such tests are usually not used online as display setting, different monitors and surrounding light change the perception of color and therefore the results can’t be trusted on.

Color Blindness Tests
Learn more at my specific article about color blindness tests of the series Color Blind Essentials or take one of my online test right here at Colblindor.

Dr. Terrace L. Waggoner, a well known optometrist when it comes to color blindness, developed one of the best known Ishihara plates tests. He made some special research when it comes to pediactric color vision tests and produced Color Vision Testing Made Easy.

His son T.J. Waggoner took now a new way and made some of the pseudoisochromatic plates available as online test. There are two different test sets: One consisting of numbers and a pediactric test consisting of signs. Everybody can take those tests for a small fee. You will find them at Testing Color Vision and don’t forget to use the Colblindor discount code «colblindor» to get 20% off.

The Pros
It’s nice to have a very good Ishihara plates test available online. Of course, you can find many others but usually those are put together as a set of scanned pictures which results in much lower quality and reliability.

I took the test twice, tried to cheat, but couldn’t spot any of the numbers. The quality of the images is really good.

Ishihara Plate by Testing-Color-Vision

The Cons
There is still no study which could tell us more about the validity and reliability of online color vision tests with uncalibrated computer monitors. I heard they are working on it and I’m looking forward to it. But already now I’m quite sure that an online color blindness test of high quality can be as good as a visit to an eye specialist.

The second thing which I don’t like that much is the result of the test. It just says if you are color blind or not but doesn’t tell anything about the severity. This is something people really are looking for and I would strongly suggest to include this in a future release.

Visit the online pseudoisochromatic plates test by Terrace L. Waggoner at Testing Color Vision (Colblindor discount code: «colblindor») and tell me what you think about it.

$3.300 to Lessen the Handicap of Color Blindness

People 2 Comments

In my last poll I asked colorblind visitors and readers of Colblindor: “Would You Pay Money to Improve Your Color Vision?” During the ten days of evaluation 280 people joined the poll – thank you very much.

Many people who suffer from any form of color vision deficiency are looking for a possibility to improve their color vision or even cure it. It is interesting to learn what people are willing to pay to reduce this handicap and get a broader color sensation. Here are the results of the poll:

Would you pay money to correct your color vision deficiency?

Would you pay money to correct your cvd?

In the first chart I merged together all the votes which would pay from $1 to more then $10,000 to improve color vision. This gives us a broad view if people are willing to pay money at all.

The result shows, that less than 20% are not willing to pay any money at all to improve their color vision or even cure a color vision deficiency completely. Out of the rest around 60% would spend money for an improvement. Overall around one third would only pay if the actual treatment or used technique would completely cure their color vision deficiency.

How much money would you spend to improve your color vision?

How much would you spend to correct your cvd?

The second chart shows only the votes from colorblind people who are willing to spend money to improve their color vision.

There is a broad range of the amount people would pay to lessen their handicap. The lower end starts at something between $1 and $300 and the upper limit I suppose goes up to several $10.000!

If you look at the graph the votes are quite evenly distributed over the whole range. But on the other side there is something you could call a split between $5.000 and $10.000. I suppose this comes from the fact that some people above that limit are willing to pay almost any amount just to get rid of their color blindness. Below the limit of around $3.000 to $5.000 many people would pay some money but can also arrange themselves with their handicap.

If we strictly just take the lower limits of each range we get an average of around $3.300 which some colorblind people are willing to pay for an improvement of their color vision. This makes an overall amount of almost half a million dollars just for the people who voted on this poll! I wonder how much money you can earn if you really can cure color blindness…