Earlier this week I was contacted by Luke Jefferson, one of the creators of the new Huetility Colorblind Simulator. He let me know about this application he and his colleague have developed that will be available on Saturday, June 6th for the iPhone. This application, their first, is built to simulate the vision of a colorblind person to help users such as photographers, designers and anyone else who works with color understand how the colorblind may view things. The simulator will allow the user to see an image on their iPhone or taken with the iPhone’s camera and will simulate the way someone with a dichromatic color vision deficiency will see things.
Since the program and the company are both new I wanted to get some information from Luke about them. I asked a few questions about their background, this application and where they see things going:
A brief introduction, tell me a bit about you and what you’re up to:
My name is Luke Jefferson (29) and I’ve been working with Luke Walsh (27) on developing tools to help people with colorblindness better perceive, understand and interact with color. We are developing software for designers to help them better select colours and also tools specifically for colorblind users. For colorblind users, we are developing tools for the desktop PC and also the mobile phone.
Tell me about your background and your company:
Luke Walsh obtained an MEng in electronics engineering from the University of York and I completed my Ph.D in computer science at the University of East Anglia in 2008. We started the business together in 2007 after returning from the United States; we were both NCGE/Kauffman Global Scholars in 2006-2007 which allowed us to study entrepreneurship and business at Harvard, Stanford and the Kauffman Foundation. We both loved technology and each wanted to start a business so we figured why not start one together. The business is called Scratchface (based in Liverpool, U.K.) and we started working full-time on it in December 2008.
What is Huetility Colorblind Simulator’ Explain what it does, how it works and who you envision using it:
We’ve spent the past five months developing tools to improve accessibility for people with color vision impairments–this was following on from my PhD research on colorblind computer accessibility. Our first product, called Huetility Colorblind Simulator will be available for iPhone from 6th June. It lets people with normal color vision see the world through the eyes of a colorblind viewer using the camera on their phone. It integrates the best models of colorblindness, which are based on experiments with people with one colorblind eye and one full color vision eye. These experiments allowed the colours that are confused by colorblind viewers to be determined through a series of color matching experiments, which form the basis of much of what we understand about color vision. These are the same simulations that are used by the well-known vischeck website, which allows visitors to upload color images and see what they might look like to a colorblind viewer. It’s a great tool for anyone who wants to better understand how colorblindness distorts the perception of colours, and is intended to be useful to people who know someone who is colorblind, e.g. parents/children or friends. It’s also useful for designers (graphic designers, interior designers), photographers and people who work with color. The Huetility Colorblind Simulator app. lets you compare the different types of colourblindness, including the main dichromatic forms. It also includes an error view that highlights the regions in color images that might be problematic for colorblind viewers, which is great for checking that your designs are accessbile to people with color vision impairments. In addition to using the camera, it also has a sample images folder which contains images that highlight the problems of color blindness.
What got you in to the colorblindness business’ What’s next for you in terms of future products?
I realised colorblindness was a problem when interning for a graphic design company whilst completing my undergraduate degree. A client wanted their new corporate identity to be as accessible as possible, esp. to people with color vision impairments. This was back in 1999 when simulators for modeling colorblindness werent accessible by graphic designers and they couldn’t be sure how their designs would be viewed by people with colorblindness. Later on, I stumbled on a similar problem and that got me thinking that it should be possible to do something to help… So we have developed other tools that are better suited for helping colorblind computer users that adapt digital images so that the colors used accomodate the viewers particular type of colorblindness. These will be going live in the next couple of months, which we’re really excited about as we’ve tested them with many colorblind users and they love the results.
Luke also provided me with some screenshots of the application in action:
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- The original color image.
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- Types of colorblindness that can be simulated.
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- Simulation of protanopia.
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- Highlight color differences in the simulated image.
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- Side by side of the original and simulated images.
The screen shots above show the application simulating protanopia on a photograph I took last summer. Since it is simulating protanopia, which means the observer is missing red cones, it is easy to see that the red areas in the image lose their color.
Huetility Colorblind Simulator sounds like it is going to be a very promising application for those who want to make sure their content and products retain high visibility for the colorblind. As Luke mentions in his last response there will be more applications coming in the future and platform support should extend beyond the iPhone. I will obviously post updates regarding those new utilities as they are made available. I hope to post reviews for certain future applications, particularly those designed to help the colorblind.
You can learn more about the application by clicking the following link: Huetility Colorblind Simulator
If you are interested in getting Huetility Colorblind Simulator yourself you can follow this link to the iPhone App store. The application will be priced at 1.79 ($2.99), not bad for something that many people could find quite handy.
