Software to Help Colorblind Folks

A lot of devices have been created to help visually impaired computer users. But until recently, not much attention has been paid to the particular needs of one segment of that population -- colorblind people.

Colorblindness affects millions of people. It's estimated that about 8% of males and 0.5% of females in the U.S., Canada and Europe have some type of colorblindness.

There is software available, though, that can help colorblind people detect the differences among colors on their computer screens.

Tenebraex Corp., a Boston-based company that works primarily on defense technology, recently put on the market a $34 program called eyePilot, which offers several tools to help people navigate color graphics and Web sites.

One of the software's functions is a "gray" tool, which turns everything on the screen gray other than the chosen color, allowing for everything in the selected color to be seen more easily. For example, on a subway map, where lines of different colors could be difficult for a colorblind person to follow, clicking on any one of the lines will make it stand out against a gray background.

EyePilot also offers a "flash" tool, which makes all instances of a given color flash as white or black when the user clicks on an area of the screen with that color. This can be particularly useful for reading maps or charts that include a color key that tells the reader what data are represented by each color.

There are a couple of free options that also may be helpful to colorblind people. One is software called Visolve.

Visolve sharpens the contrasts on a screen by brightening or darkening the colors that colorblind people have trouble discerning -- it can make reds brighter and greens darker, or blues brighter and yellows darker. It can also make a given color stand out by darkening all other colors on the screen. And it can draw different hatch patterns on colors to make them easier to tell apart.

Visolve can be downloaded from www.Ryobi-sol.co.jp/visolve/en/.

Another tool is available at Vischeck.com, the Web site of Vischeck of Menlo Park, Calif.

Vischeck offers what it calls a "Daltonizing" program, named for the British scientist John Dalton, who was a pioneer of colorblindness studies. This program, which is a free Web-based service, alters images by taking colors that are hidden to colorblind people and moving them to a range of the color spectrum where they are visible again.

Excerpts from the Wall Street Journal