EIZO Releases Color Vision Deficiency Simulation Monitor
EIZO has created a monitor that can simulate various types of vision deficiencies (PDF document). It is great to see hardware vendors making an effort to provide tools to improve accessibility, but this one makes me wonder. Do you really need to have hardware support for this? The advantage seems to be that you can test moving images more easily.
EIZO worked closely with the Color Universal Design Organization (CUDO) (also see english machine translation) in conducting experiments with colorblind test subjects to improve the ability to identify difficult to distinguish colors.
Fore those not fortunate to have access to an EIZO monitor, there are a number of software tools available to simulate how web pages and images look with various types of vision deficiencies:
- Vischeck (which you have probably used if you tried the Web Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer.
- Colorblind Web Page Filter - simulates a whole range of deficiencies such as deutanopia, tritanopia, protanomaly, tritanomaly and more.
What I haven’t seen is an application that isn’t confined to the browser, but works on top of your operating system. I guess this wouldn’t be very hard to do. Depending on the operating system it should be possible to have a filter applied to the entire screen. If you know of one, please post it in the comments below.
In fact there are some softwares :
http://www.disability.uiuc.edu/cita/software/vis/ to simulate visual deficiencies for the whole display
http://www.disability.uiuc.edu/cita/software/vis/ to simulate visual deficiencies of web pages and test accessibility criterias
Erratum : here is the correct second link http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/adesigner (sorry)
Sim Daltonism is an utility for MacOS X. You can drag the window to the desired size and screen position, and via key combinations switch diferent “modes” of colour blindnes.
Sim Daltonism
Hrvoje, Sim Daltonism was an interesting application. It makes it easy to quickly test any type of application, images and web pages. On my MacBook Pro it runs a bit hot (it seems to need a lot of processor power), but works great.
The Colour Contrast Analyser 1.1 has a feature that lets you drag a window viewer around the screen, the part of the screen within the viewers window will be displayed with colours simulating common forms of colour blindness(as well as other simulations -greyscale etc.)