Color Oracle: Preview Color Impaired vision

Saw this on the 37 Signals blog, extreme coolness. It’s a small Java based application which will freeze the screen you are currently on and change the colors based on the type of color impairment you are testing. The three options are

• Deuteranopia (Common)
• Protanopia (Rare)
• Tritanopia (Very Rare)

Once installed (it requires JRE 6 which you can get here) it will run in your taskbar until you need it. Right click on the icon and it will bring up the above options to preview the current screen in one of the modes. I have only tried the Windows version which is currently in beta, but I have not run into any trouble so far.

The concept is perfect, and as far as I know, there is nothing else like this out there. Photoshop or Dreamweaver really should implement something like this for quick previewing while working on sites. After all, if you don’t make it easy, people won’t use it.

Color Oracle 1.1 beta for Windows

Wikipedia - Color blind

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