the adventures of teapot the cat

Color Blind

Posted on July 11th, 2005

I came across this neat tool that lets you simulate what a website would look like to a color blind person. What’s cool is that it will process images too. Colorblind Filter. This site has a web safe color chart that also incorporates a mini-chart that shows what those same colors would look like to a (certain type of) color blind person.

I’ve always wondered if we are able to communicate about colors in a empiric way. Being colorblind is a pretty serious alteration of the spectrum, but what if every person’s color understanding was skewed just a little bit? What one person might see as red might look orange to another person. But since we have all been brought up with the same labelling system for colors, we would call it the same name nonetheless. One particular thing that I always fight about is the color of the middle light on a traffic light (USA) - i call it orange. Most other people I know call it yellow. What’s the deal with that?

And it is very easy to alter your color perception - cover one eye for a few minutes (so it is in darkness). Then uncover the eye and look through only left, then only right. I find this creates some fairly significant color shifts in my vision.

Next question : what is the limits of our visual perception? What color is right before a ‘color’ or wavelength we cant see? What if some people have a wider range of wavelength that they can see?

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