HN Reader

I’ll highlight a note from the developer:

Sim Daltonism lets you see through the eyes of someone with a color blindness. While the colors shown are a good approximation of what a color blind person would see, you should not expect them to be perfect.

Everyone has his own perception of colors that differs slightly from other people, and color blindness are often partial at different degrees. More importantly, cameras do not have the same spectral response as cones in your eyes, so the simulation has to make some assumptions about the frequency composition of the colors.

I’m colorblind and haven’t found a simulator that comes close to what it’s like for me. This app doesn’t do it either.

For anyone on Android, this is possible with Simulate Color Space option in the hidden Developer Tools menu. Amusingly it works with the camera too, so you can look around the real world with some sense of what it's like.

Tangential: I've been playing around with the color blindness filters on my iPhone, and the grayscale filter had me thinking for a moment. I've set it to 50%, set up the accessibility shortcut (triple-click on the home button) to toggle it, and found myself using my phone with the filter on basically 99% of the time.

It's been a couple of months, and I've noticed that the oversaturated colors were making me slightly agitated, somehow captivating my attention. I sometimes disable the filter to look at a particular picture, or to figure out a detail in some context where the colors are already desaturated. Now my only wish is that it was less linear, maybe like a compressor in audio - maintain detail until it starts approaching the ceiling.

It may be a good idea if you'd consider <thelightphone.com> but don't want to switch.

Also, Rob Pike: <https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/09/color-blindness-i...>

Also: <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=plan+9+from+bell+labs+rio&ia=image...>

Huge fan of this tool for working on GUI implementations, ensuring the color choices and contrasts make sense for users that see GUIs differently than I do.

Could this be used in reverse to correct for color vision disorders, e.g. by punching down greens and blues and punching up reds into the outer range of the P3 gamut?

Kudos to the developer for creating such an optimized app! It's only 444KB for iOS.

This is such a useful tool, I constantly pop it up to check contrast in my art.