Sim Daltonism
This program can be easily used by programmers and content developers to see how their design will look to people with various types of colour blindness. The program could also be used by educators and others as an awareness exercise to show people what the computer screen looks like to a colour blind person.
Sim Daltonism is a color blindness simulator for Mac OS X. It filters in real-time the area around the mouse pointer and displays the result - as seen by a color blind person - in a floating palette.
Since there are many types of color blindness, Sim Daltonism allow you to choose the one you want to see.
Red-green colour blindness (protoanopia), for example, is the most common type of colour blindness. If your program distinguishes between two states by changing an area from red to green - a common visual signal - somebody with protoanopia will not be able to see this. The first example I came across on my computer when testing this program was the MacBreakZ program, whose icon changes from green to yellow to red to tell you if you’re working too intensely. With the Sim Daltonism program I realised that both the red and green showed up as a muddy yellow colour - so the red, yellow, and green icons all looked the same. Azureus, in contrast, uses a green arrow for the “start” button and a red cross for the “stop” button - this preserves the red/green stoplight type cues for those of us with colour vision but also allows colourblind users to get all the same information. I am sure I could find many more examples of designs relying solely on colour distinctions - especially using red-yellow-green traffic light metaphor - in programs currently on my Mac.
It wouldn’t take a developer more than a few minutes to view their program through the free Sim Daltonism viewer - and the information you gain might surprise you. I highly recommend this.
Website: Sim Daltonism
- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac












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