Related sites and products

Since I first posted this site in 1998, various other people have developed tools along similar lines - sometimes based on what I've done, sometimes independently. This page has links to the ones I know about. I also include any articles that refer to this work.

Colour Blindness: Causes and Effects

This is a new book by Donald McIntyre "for the general reader that explains the nature and consequences of colour blindness". It is thorough without being excessively technical. A valuable resource for "the colour-blind, their parents and spouses" as well as teachers, careers advisors, and designers.

Website for Donald McIntyre's book: Colour Blindness: Causes and Effects

Designers' tools

This Colorblind web page filter is a powerful and flexible tool for dynamically showing you how your page looks to different dichromats as well as levels of grayscale. The resulting view also includes a nav bar to toggle between the different filters.
Q42 have produced a Color Blindness Check which dynamically transforms web pages for checking. A very neat, easy to use tool (although I can't vouch for the validity of a 70% check). This was inspired by a dyanmic comparisons page by Cal Henderson.
Vischeck also do a Color vision simulator, and have both an online version for checking images, and a URL to check web pages dynamically.

For best results on any of these, chose your colours carefully to begin with when designing a page. The resources below are useful during the design stage of your work.

The Visibone Color Card and Color Chart display the standard web-safe palette, with a small copy alongside that approximates the colours as seen by a deuteranope. The Colorlab assembles a colour palette, and screen clips can then be transformed with my palettes.
Philip Chalmers has developed a tool called Fonts and colours lab for trying out font and colour combinations. It offers a way to try 4 different combinations of font, foreground and background alongside each other.
Colorfield have produced a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop (currently only for the Mac) that allows you to check your graphics for image legibility for the three types of dichromatism. It is available to buy from their site, and there is a demo version as well. Their site also includes some examples of what the filtered images look like.
YoYo design have produced a tool called nColor, which can be used on the web page or downloaded for use on the desktop. This allows you to choose background and text colours, useful for checking readability for your choices. It also has a switch to view the approximations for the three kinds of dichromatism.
Thomas Wolfmaier has written an article (Designing for the Color Challenged) which includes an applet that allows you to type in background and text colours of your choice. It then displays the transformed colours and their RGB values. Because it uses algorithms, it is not restricted to the web-safe colour palettes.

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Articles

Now you see it, now you don't. An article by Christian Rigden for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer magazine, July 2002, p 104 - 105. About how the ideas behind this site were developed.
Adjusting for the Colorblind. An article by Ian Austin for the New York Times, 2 November 2000.
Can color-blind users see your site? An article by Robert Hess, 9 Oct 2000, previously appearing on the Microsft Developers Network (MSDN) website . Some good explanations and some guidelines for choosing colours.
Color Vision Confusion. From the Universal Usability in Practice site, a class project from the University of Maryland, May 2001. Offers visual design guidlelines for avoiding problems with colour deficiency. There are links to many resources on this topic, mostly since 1999.

(updated in Oct 2002)

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