Newsmaker: Bringing color to the color-blind

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Are you color-blind, if you don't mind me asking?
Jones: No.

So what gave you inspiration to translate that theory and the color vision technology into developing this type of software?
Jones: You know, when I was a kid I went to school and learned from black text on white paper with an Encyclopedia Britannica. My daughter started elementary school doing homework on computers with broadband and the Web, and the way computers interact with people, color is a way that you differentiate lots of data on computer. You have pie charts, and stock charts, and weathers charts and scattered graphs.

In the real world the color-blind person will have cues. The red light on the stoplight is generally at the top, things like that. On the computer if you're color-blind, you don't know when you're looking at something if you're missing most of the information or you're getting it.

It affects 1 out of every 12 men, which means on average one kid in every class is color-blind. They're doing their research and testing and whatever on a computer, and sometimes they can get all the information and sometimes they don't have a clue. And it's a funny clientele. You know, guys tend to be taught to suck it up, don't complain. And you can't identify other color-blind people by looking at them. So, it's very hard.

You know, there are an equivalent number of men who have ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and they have buildings and foundations and things that study ADHD. But for the color-blind they don't, even though there are some safety and usability issues in terms of red lights and such. Say you're a really good (stock) trader, but the company is throwing you a lot of data and it's all color-coded. Maybe it takes you 20 minutes to do something someone else is doing in 6 minutes, to read these complex charts, and so you're a little bit less efficient.

So is the EyePilot software corrective? Will it allow someone with color-blindness to see the same thing I see when I look at the color wheel?
Jones: No. What we're doing basically among a lot of the tools is, it's either simplifying or putting some information into things other than colors. For instance, to a color-blind person there may be eight segments on a pie chart and they can only tell apart two or three so they don't know looking at it what anything means. We have a Flash tool. If you have a pie chart and you say OK, I want to know what this segment means, you click on it in the key and everything in the EyePilot window with that color flashes.

Color-blind people don't want to draw attention (to their condition). And so the idea with the cell phone is that people will think you're text messaging.

Or if you're looking at a color-coded subway map and you're trying to get from here to there and they all cross over each other, you're not sure which route is consistent. You can click on one route, and everything in the EyePilot window with that exact color stays the same, and everything else changes to a gray-scale image.

It isn't just for the color-blind.

You mean, it can help anyone overwhelmed by too many colors?
Jones: Yeah. Computers have gotten so capable and able to relate so many data sets. Color is what computers use, but computers now can exceed the resolution ability of everyone. The information is important, and you do want to differentiate all those different kinds, and a map is the most effective, fastest way...but you can do millions of colors, so the natural progression is, wow, let's use 20 colors or 30 colors.

So does it rearrange the color scheme so that someone with color blindness can more easily distinguish a pie chart?
Jones: One of the tools does hue. It interactively remaps all the colors in the image. We see a little rotating dial and you can turn it until you see a place where now you can separate adjacent colors clearly.

Can you set the software once for your personal type of color blindness and then leave it?
Jones: No, because a color-blind person can't differentiate all the colors in the spectrum at the same time. For each image the color-blind person needs change. A color-blind person sees a two-dimensional slice through a three-dimension color space because they only have two channels. So any one shift in the color is just rotating the orientation of that slice, but it's still only a slice. What you need to do is to simplify or separate. For instance, two colors on a map that look quite different to someone with normal color vision look almost identical to a color-blind person. Using the hue tool they can rotate and all of a sudden there'll be a place where, "Oh! These two colors, which look the same, look like there's one area of color now. I can see clearly there's two sets of information here."

So what type of color blindness does the software accommodate?
Jones: Any type. And you don't need to do any testing, and that's because it's interactive. There've been other techniques that people have tried with filtered glasses and so forth. They make some colors easier to tell apart, but at the same time (they)'re going to make some colors that they could tell apart more difficult to tell apart. There's no technology that we know of that will allow a color-blind person to differentiate all colors.

Is the EyePilot software available for both Mac and PC users?
Jones: Yes. For $35. There's a 30-day free trial at Colorhelper.com.

Can you now explain how the cell phone version of EyePilot works?
Jones: We used as a test platform a Palm Pilot with a camera so that you would look at the real world on your screen and then be able to find out, using the different EyePilot tools, what a certain target color was or use a tool to differentiate.

Based on talking with color-blind people, they don't want to draw attention (to their condition). And so the idea with the cell phone is that people will think you're text messaging. No one knows you're using an assistive aid. You're just tapping on your cell phone. Meanwhile, the cell phone is telling you when you're standing in front of the bus map that's the route you take or that tie is green. But it's quiet, it's in the background and you're not drawing attention to yourself, but you're empowering yourself. That's why we think a cell phone platform is a good way to go with it.

When would the software for the cell phone be out?
Jones: Well, our job now is to go out and convince cell phone service providers or the hardware providers that this is a good teacher. Part of it is an educational aspect first, because most people don't realize how many people are color-blind. Certainly most people don't realize how debilitating it is in certain areas. Again, statistically it's 1 out of every 12 men.

More Newsmakers

[NoVista]

Virtual colour

At one time, he was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's richest scientist. [borrowed from Wikipedia]

There's a good biography by McElheny, "Insisting on the Impossible".

When I was a budding television engineer, somebody told me about Land's two-colour experiments. That was published first, I believe in Scientific American, 1959 ...

Around the late 60s, the Japanese did some colour rendering experiments using black-and-white film projectors, and probably some exectronic switching, taking advantage of human persistence of vision.

I remembered from uni psychology class, some rotating disk with a pattern on it which at some rpm speed produced a colour effect. Aha, so I did an experiment in the workshop once with a B&W camera, greyscale chart, and experimental field switching breadboard. Although I didn't achieve a broad spectrum, there was some virtual colour perception. For me, and others. Curiously, one or two witnesses still saw nothing but B&W.