I'm at an entrepreneurship conference where the project owner (a designer) is an invited talker and i had the pleasure of also talking to him directly.
This system is already being implemented, not also here in Portugal (on subway/street signs, product labels, ink resellers and many more) but across Europe and Americas (Brasil), apparently.
Since i'm a developer, i immediately considered smartphone and possibly tablet applications and i hope we will brainstorm it soon :-) i found it a very exciting and valuable project, and a simple and effective solution to a complex problem (color blindness).
Augmented reality applications where the 1st thing to come to mind, which would be awesome! And there are more simple applications that may help not only color blinded people to learn the code, but also non-color blinded people to get over an apparently serious stigma [bullying] against color blinded people.
It always upsets me when those that won the genetic lottery in some way or other piss on those that lost. Anything to help restore the balance here is a good thing and should be encouraged.
Curiously, when asked how he had the idea of developing that color code (which was obviously influenced by the fact that the person is an experienced designer [and teacher]) he replied that, as a kid he was one of the bullies [group], who picked on other color blinded kid(s) just because he/they couldn't identify crayon colors.
I see the value in this system but I'm not sure how does it actually improve my day to day in the sense that, me not being able to see colors doesn't have that big of a negative impact on my current day to day. (I wanted to be a pilot so being colorblind does have a negative impact sometimes)
A few years back I purchased a pair of ChromaGen color glasses that allow me to see the color red. That was a WTF moment.
The world made sense right then and there: Warning signs, skin, tomatoes, coke can, etc, etc. Is amazing how different (and greenish) the world is to me.
To be honest I don't use them to much: every time I wear them for long, the word is full of colors and once I take them off I return to this green(ish) reality and my mood changes immediately. I feel down right away.
I think I read somewhere that there are around 16.000.000 colorblind people in the US alone. I think this is a market that would pay big money to be able to see properly (I payed 1200 euros for a pair of glasses to just help me see the color red).
It's not for making the colors nicer to look at for you but to avoid you putting on clothes which doesn't match in colors and look really off-putting to the non-color-blind (e.g. red pants, pink T-shirt).
It can be more than that. Think safety. When I drive in Quebec the road signs are a slightly different hue than used in Ontario. I had a hard time figuring out which signs were informational - construction after 19h, and the "lane ends 200m" need different reactions.
As far as clothes, I have a "garanimals" system with numbers to match up shirts and pants and optionally ties. Hopefully my wife is merciful and matching my clothes tastefully.
I am not colorblind, but I did read a review in interest. These are not recommended for driving because they apparently make dim and night more difficult, and things like tunnels can be a problem.
In this regard, and for the purposes of signage, etc. it would be helpful. I'm dealing with blue-green colorblindness right now due to a pretty bad (3+ NS) cataract in my only eye, and while I don't have problems looking at colors on, say, a computer monitor, I often stand in my closet asking myself "Is this shirt blue, or is it green?"
According to the talk (which derived from real case studies), we (in Portugal) have a population of 10% with one of the several variations of color blindness.
In my 1st job (on a small IT department), i had a colleague (from the electronics department) which had a variation of it. Dealing with electronics, means in some form, dealing with color codes, like colored cables, LED's and other instruments, which means he had difficulties dealing with it. It was not very known, and i understood why after the talk, in which there seems to be a stigma on color blinded about them being recognized as such.
So, although not perfect, it made sense to me as solution to allow people being independent. I live in front of one of the metro stations, in which this code is already applied (like in many other countries, our metro rails are identified by a letter and a color).
In our hospital urgencies, we use a braced color to identify the urgency of the patient. Green, blue, yellow, IIRC.
Like real blindness, there may not be cure, but there are solutions to improve a person's life quality, even if it just helping a [color blinded] father being able to pick baby clothes for his son, not "daughter" :-)
I was hoping for a site where I could finally enter a hex code or something and find out what color it is. I find it very hard to differ dark blue and purple and dark yellows and bright greens.
There is a small program for Windows (being developed) to sample and code a screen color sample, but much more could be done. Can you imagine the stress that receiving a corrected document (word processor) in which the sections to correct are red/yellow, to a color blinded secretary? It's real, there are case studies that relate these problems fron kids to grown ups.
20 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 70.6 ms ] thread#79
Cool!
Maybe when color finally goes bust they can get the domain, it seems like a much more useful application for such a domain.
This system is already being implemented, not also here in Portugal (on subway/street signs, product labels, ink resellers and many more) but across Europe and Americas (Brasil), apparently.
Since i'm a developer, i immediately considered smartphone and possibly tablet applications and i hope we will brainstorm it soon :-) i found it a very exciting and valuable project, and a simple and effective solution to a complex problem (color blindness).
Augmented reality applications where the 1st thing to come to mind, which would be awesome! And there are more simple applications that may help not only color blinded people to learn the code, but also non-color blinded people to get over an apparently serious stigma [bullying] against color blinded people.
Super stuff, really.
I see the value in this system but I'm not sure how does it actually improve my day to day in the sense that, me not being able to see colors doesn't have that big of a negative impact on my current day to day. (I wanted to be a pilot so being colorblind does have a negative impact sometimes)
A few years back I purchased a pair of ChromaGen color glasses that allow me to see the color red. That was a WTF moment.
The world made sense right then and there: Warning signs, skin, tomatoes, coke can, etc, etc. Is amazing how different (and greenish) the world is to me.
To be honest I don't use them to much: every time I wear them for long, the word is full of colors and once I take them off I return to this green(ish) reality and my mood changes immediately. I feel down right away.
I think I read somewhere that there are around 16.000.000 colorblind people in the US alone. I think this is a market that would pay big money to be able to see properly (I payed 1200 euros for a pair of glasses to just help me see the color red).
I wish someone would find a solution to this.
As far as clothes, I have a "garanimals" system with numbers to match up shirts and pants and optionally ties. Hopefully my wife is merciful and matching my clothes tastefully.
My solution has been to own a lot of grey shirts.
In my 1st job (on a small IT department), i had a colleague (from the electronics department) which had a variation of it. Dealing with electronics, means in some form, dealing with color codes, like colored cables, LED's and other instruments, which means he had difficulties dealing with it. It was not very known, and i understood why after the talk, in which there seems to be a stigma on color blinded about them being recognized as such.
So, although not perfect, it made sense to me as solution to allow people being independent. I live in front of one of the metro stations, in which this code is already applied (like in many other countries, our metro rails are identified by a letter and a color).
In our hospital urgencies, we use a braced color to identify the urgency of the patient. Green, blue, yellow, IIRC.
Like real blindness, there may not be cure, but there are solutions to improve a person's life quality, even if it just helping a [color blinded] father being able to pick baby clothes for his son, not "daughter" :-)
edit: apparently based on this (which has a worse color picker but probably better results): http://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color
The shapes which currently add up to a square instead need to add up to something with a rotational symmetry of 1.
Many things that have issue with color independence rotate freely.