I was contacted by Maria, a visitor of color-blindness.com. She is doing a survey about color blindness, how this affects daily routine and if some color vision deficiency tools could help to improve the situation. Hereafter you can find her short call to join her survey.

Please spend just two minutes to help her out. Thanks – Daniel from Colblindor.

Hello,
I am Maria Soto, a student enrolled in the Degree in Optics and Optometry at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (www.upc.edu). For my final year project, I plan to undertake research on colour deficiency applications for smartphones or PCs in order to discover if these are useful or not.
An important part of my work will involve sending a questionnaire to a large group of colour deficiency subjects. The aim is to gain information regarding possible difficulties in daily activities that those people could have experienced in their lives.
If you want participate, in this link you will find the questionnaire:
Online Survey on Color Blindness.
Thank you for your participation.
Maria Soto

Finally I could release today my new design of Colblindor at color-blindness.com. It took me quite a long time — to long if you ask me. But finally I arrived where I wanted to.

I hope you like the new spirit. I made it easier to access to most important pages including the knowledge pages like Color Blind Essentials or the 50 Facts on Color Blindness, the color vision deficiency tests and the tools, which are available. It’s now also easier for me to handle the whole site, as it is powered by the newest technologies.

The history of Colblindor goes back to 2006 where I started the whole project:

• Starting a blog about color blindness in 2006, at that time with no main URL
• Moved to www.colblindor.com as the main URL for the next 6 years
• Did some design changes during that time and produced a lot of content
• Purchased color-blindness.com in 2013 and moved Colblindor to its new home
• Complete redesign of the whole site and published it in January 2014

With the new design the site also had some major changes: I removed the forum, as it was huge work to keep all the spam out of it—sorry for that. On the other hand I have now a color blindness facebook fan site, which I would like to push further and get the interaction transferred to. So if you like this, friend me there :-)

I hope you like all the changes and the new setting. If you find anything which is not working properly, don’t hesitate to get in contact with me.

If you are colorblind it can be sometimes quite hard to play certain games. Something as simple as a green team playing against a red one can be a big issue if you have a color vision deficiency.

World of Warcraft is one of the most played games around the world. Blizzard, the company behind the game, will introduce with the next patch (3.1) a module for disabled people. This includes a part for enhancing the interface for colorblind people. Some objects, which were traditionally color coded, can now be assigned to letters or symbols.

The people from AbleGamers, a community for disabled gamers, interviewed a lead developer from Blizzard, Tom Chilton. They wanted to learn more about this new colorblind option.

Here is a list of enhancements for colorblind WoW gamers. The listed features either support an already existing color coding or replace it.

• Tags distinguish friendly, neutral, or hostile creatures and enemies.
• Gear quality has additional text descriptions.
• The three different coin types are labeled with single letters.
• Recommended character level is listed as a number.
• Learned recipes will be rated from + through to +++.

This sounds like quite a big step forward. As a colorblind less than part time gamer I am very happy about every little enhancement in the games I play. Almost never I can see the difference between color coded stuff in the first moment. So I either will learn it during the gameplay or just never really know what I am doing.

In the case of such a big game like World of Warcraft, there are obviously many more possibilities to enhance it for gamers suffering from color blindness. Here is one more example, taken from the same article:

Additionally, some things were overlooked in Blizzard’s version of this add-on. Rogues accumulate combo points as they attack their victims. These combo points are shown as red dots in an arc around the picture of the rogue’s target. As the points are accumulated, the red dots are filled in.

Someone who was colorblind to the color red would not be able to tell the difference between a red dot filled in with red and a red dot lightly shaded with red. One member of the player base identified this problem and created a specific add-on called Kast Combo Points that would change the way the points are displayed. This modification changed the red dots so that they are completely hidden until a combo point is awarded.

Dear colorblind gamer, I’m sure you will and already found your personal way to play the games you like. And if color blindness gets to much into your way, just play another game. Don’t forget, it’s just a game.

Occupational Health & Safety is the industry-leading news magazine, eNewsletter, and website for occupational health and safety professionals. The February issue 2009 will feature the topic “Vision Testing: A Blind Spot In Occupational Safety”, including web links to Colblindor, as a resource about color blindness.

What is the article all about?

The author claims, that vision is often not checked regularly if you compare it to hearing or blood pressure. And this causes that many employees are short sighted, have no depth perception, are night blind, or are suffering from color vision deficiency—unrecognized from their employers—whereas this handicaps can be real safety problems.

As an employer you should ask yourself:

• When did your employees have the last vision check?
• Is some aspect of vision crucial for their job?
• Should you introduce some vision tests in the recruitment process?

I can’t judge all aspects of the article. But I can judge the part about color vision, which is unfortunately not very well researched. All they say is that color blindness could be a problem for drivers because of the traffic lights. I think this is a bit to superficial. You can find my opinion on this topic at: Colorblind at the Traffic Light.

Anyway, thanks for linking me up.

The RGB Anomaloscope can be used to check if you are suffering from red-green color blindness or not. Unfortunately it is not possible to differentiate between the different forms of red-green color…

Continue reading →

Looks like Apple heard the scream of colorblind persons, when they released their availability checker tool. If you believe it or not, they changed their interface to make it more readable for us: Apple Remembers the Colorblind.

Today I would like to share with you two links to other blog posts which are very much related to color blindness.

Gerald posted a picture on his Photoblog about Red Roofs and Colour Blindness and writes about his problems on color perception. Unfortunately with my red-blindness I can’t help him at all. It looks red, or brown, or anything in between.

The second link points you to a very interesting article: iPhone Available: Except To Color Blind Users written by Glenn. There was such huge a media coverage and I suppose many million people visiting apple in the last days. And apple offered a nice tool to check the availability of their iPhone. The only problem, it’s not made for somebody with red-green color vision deficiency. It is almost unbelievable that these days such big companies break the basic rules of accessibility.

Mike from 10,000 Birds put together a fantastic issue of Carnival of Colors. His introduction into the submission list of eight great articles about color, reads as follows: “Color, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.”

Make sure to visit Carnival of Colors V. And put a mark on your calender on the 1st of august. This will be the next release date of Carnival of Colors. Contributions are very welcome and if you would like to host one of the future issues, just let me know.

Which are the most powerful colors in your life? Do you have any at all or are they changing from time to time?

Tell your story and join the next issue of Carnival of Colors. This carnival includes anything in anyway related to colors. So don’t wait and write your point of view concerning this broad topic.

My favorite colors are a grass green and a sunflower yellow. I also enjoy blood red or a very dark tree-leaf green.

The next issue of the carnival will be published first of July. This time the carnival host is Mike from 10,000 Birds. Thanks Mike and a warm welcome to all the friends of birds in the world of color blindness.

If you like to join, just contact me including the link to the article you wish to be included.