iPhone Color Blind Tools
HueVue is a color tool for the iPhone that helps people with color vision deficiencies (commonly referred to as color blindness) to identify, match and coordinate colors. If you or someone you know has trouble with colors, or if you’re interested in a cool color identification, matching and coordination tool, then HueVue is for you!
The following video shows the basics of the color picker and introduces the favorites, color harmony, and closest features.
What color is it?
This can be a surprisingly difficult question for a colorblind person, and one that can have some embarrassing consequences. For instance, I recently went to buy my son a camera for his birthday and got him a pink one, thinking that it was gray. Oops. Fortunately my wife caught the mistake.
HueVue addresses this problem simply by enabling you to capture a picture of any object using the iPhone’s built-in camera and then to get the common color name for any point in the image just by touching it.
HueVue uses an internationally recognized color name dictionary containing 267 color names. Unlike some larger dictionaries, HueVue’s dictionary gives straightforward names to colors that you know what they mean; for example, “Deep yellowish purple” instead of “Marin Sunset”.
What does this color look like to you?
Once you select an image either by using the camera or picking an image from your photo library, HueVue can simulate either Protanopia (”red blindness”) or Deuteranopia (”green blindness”), which are the two most common forms of color vision deficiency. This is a great feature to answer the most annoying question that every person with color vision deficiency gets: “what color does this look like to you” (really a meaningless question if you think about it).
Compensating for some color vision deficiencies
There are three types of cones in the eye whose output combines to produce our sensation of color. These are the L-cones, M-cones, and S-cones, being most sensitive to long, medium and short wavelengths, respectively. People with a color vision deficiency are typically missing one of these cones, or one of these cones is not producing as much output as it should.
HueVue can boost the L-component or the M-component of any image, which might help certain people that have a weak cone response see more “normal” colors. Personally, when viewing test images when in this mode, I am able to pass some of the colorblind diagnostic tests that I would normally fail.
How well boosting these components works is very dependent on the individual, and it doesn’t work at all for people that are missing receptors altogether. In the later case, distorting the image is a better way to go. There are some algorithms that remap colors that would normally be confused by a person with a missing receptor to a different set of colors, which produces an unnatural image but can nonetheless be useful to enable such a person to see differences in color where otherwise they would see none.
As it turns out, when HueVue’s boost mode is allowed to distort the image by creating RGB values that do not fit within the normal color gamut of the display, the resulting effect helps highlight areas of the image that are affected by a poor cone response.
I’ve been very pleased with the effect, and I think you will be too.
Coordinating colors
One of the vexing problems for a colorblind person is choosing color combinations that work well together, particularly when it comes to clothes. HueVue’s color harmonies feature shows which colors could be harmoniously paired with a given color. While this is very much a subjective consideration, HueVue encodes color harmony rules taught to artists and designers and uses these to show which colors go together. This can be useful to answer questions such as “what shirts would go with this pair of pants?” or “does this tie look OK?”.
Matching colors
Another area that is less subjective is finding the closest match for a given color. This comes up in a lot of situations, particularly when using color-coded test strips or charts. For example, testing the pH of water requires comparing a sample to a set of color swatches. With HueVue, one can take a picture of the sample and swatches and then determine which swatch is the best match for a given color.
A labor of love
Being a color blind person myself, I am happy to be able to offer a tool to help others if even in a small way. I hope you try HueVue and find it useful. Please let me know what you think!