Monday, October 03, 2005

See the Web through the Eyes of Others

I'm not colorblind, but I know a number of people who are. I came across this site a while ago, and used it again today to verify that my color selection for the new blog template was colorblind-friendly (or at least, didn't totally suck).

http://colorfilter.wickline.org/

It's an interesting concept: Enter a URL, and the server will fetch that page, transform the colors according to the type of colorblindness that you select, and return the results to you.

Of course, there's no way to tell for sure if this is exactly what a colorblind person sees when viewing your web page, but it does provides insight into why color selection goes beyond just having complementary colors.

To help designers choose colors, they also offer a Color Lab:

http://colorlab.wickline.org/colorblind/colorlab/

This page shows a normal 216-color web pallet, and then what that same pallet looks like with a certain type of colorblindness selected.

I'd be curious to hear from colorblind readers how accurate this web site is (i.e., can you detect a change from the normal pallet to the generated pallet for your type of colorblindness?)