Vischeck's

April 16, 2002 1:03 PM

Vischeck's colour vision model allows you to simulate how the world looks to people with various sorts of colour deficiency. You can check a single image, or webpage, or just download it. Here's a temporary snapshot of MeFi after being vischecked.
posted by riffola (15 comments total)

Apparently the webpage emulator will soon have some CSS support.
posted by riffola at 1:07 PM on April 16, 2002

This is too cool! Shame the pshop plugin doesn't run on macs yet, though.
posted by andnbsp at 1:09 PM on April 16, 2002

I always wondered how you know if you have a slight color 'deficiency'.. I mean, I argue constantly with my wife over shades if they're brown, green, black or blue.. who's got the color problem?
posted by rich at 1:22 PM on April 16, 2002

Right, Rich - kinda depends on what you mean by "color". My (non-technical) understanding is that the color of something is whatever a particular organism's visual receptors say it is, by how the light waves stimulate the cones and rods in their eyes. Other species perceive the same things to be very different colors, and there's nearly infinite variation within a species. Does my red look like your blue? Does this tie go with that suit?
posted by yhbc at 1:30 PM on April 16, 2002

I wish game designers would use something akin to Vischeck. I have trouble distinguishing dark green from dark blue, and lots of games, such as Risk, use those colors. People look at me incredulously. "You can't tell the difference?" Yes, but only if I look very carefully in bright light.
posted by Holden at 1:37 PM on April 16, 2002

I have slightly different colour vision in each eye. One sees a more blue-ish world, the other a more brownish one.
posted by five fresh fish at 1:56 PM on April 16, 2002

Good job. Every designer should have this tool. So simple and striaghtforward, yet what a difference it will make! 10% of Americans have colour-blindness of some sort or another, and I'm sure businesses don't want to lock them out from using their products. Very cool.
posted by xammerboy at 2:15 PM on April 16, 2002

Holden: Would you also want artists to subject their color choices to your particular visual quirks? I'm sure they don't give these these any, or very little, thought, but in the end, I'm sure they decide that someone is going to be screwed no matter what they do. In reality, the number of people with any particular form of color-blindness/deficiency probably isn't large enough for them to spend any serious time considering it.

The government does make the effort of slightly tinting green traffic lights toward green and the red ones toward yellow, but that's a public safety concern.
posted by Su at 2:17 PM on April 16, 2002

Su,
No way would I want artists to compromise on behalf of anyone's visual deficiency, just as a composer shouldn't compromise a musical piece for the benefit of the hard of hearing.

As far as Risk and Parcheesi pieces, those rare people with my problem can grab the blue ones and hide the green ones. 's no big deal in the scheme of things.
posted by Holden at 2:38 PM on April 16, 2002

So for those with color blindness, how accurate is this?
posted by geoff. at 2:45 PM on April 16, 2002

And for those that haven't seen them, there's Cal's Color Vision and Q42's Color Blindness Check - inspired by Cal's page.
posted by mikhail at 3:41 PM on April 16, 2002

Wow, I have red/green colorblindness, and the examples they show are EXACTLY what I see. For a second, I thought it was a joke, as the "this is what a normal person sees" and the "this is what a red/green colorblind person sees" pictures look identical to me.

The number 3 in the show me gallery? Can't even see it if I squint.

By the way, we colorblind people hate it when you normal folk say, "Oh, you're colorblind? What color is this?" If I had a nickel...
posted by Tacodog at 5:49 PM on April 16, 2002

By the way, we colorblind people hate it when you normal folk say, "Oh, you're colorblind? What color is this?" If I had a nickel...

So you mean you can actually see colors? I thought the world of the colorblind was like my little 8" black and white TV.

I actually did think that when I was a kid and someone in elementary school said they were color blind. If you follow my kid logic, colorblind, blind means you can't see, color is the other part of the word, so it must mean you can't see color.
posted by jaden at 12:25 AM on April 17, 2002

There are bookmarklets for crudely removing colour & checking legibility available from my site (under Developer bookmarklets), including the Ultimate Legibility Test (makes a page greyscale, reduces contrast and blurs it).
posted by malevolent at 2:40 AM on April 17, 2002

We can see color, but just different ones.....

I have different color loss in each eye, and different ways... I thought I was going crazy until I was tested, and was told that it was a somewhat reasonable condition. I'm R/G deficient in my left eye, and B/Y in my right, but neither to a complete deficiency (just not as many of whatever sees colors, rods/cones/retina-gnomes). I end up with a somewhat pastel world, except in my peripherial vision, which can occasionally get bright flashes of color.

Oh, the headaches, back in my college youth, when I occasionally dabbled in....er..... nevermind.
posted by dwivian at 11:41 AM on April 17, 2002