colorblind
simulator

UX/UI

· Web/App Design

· Accessibility

· UX/UI · Web/App Design · Accessibility ·

Colorblindness is often misunderstood, and there are many misconceptions as to what being colorblind is like. Many people do not even know that they are colorblind. 1 in 200 women are colorblind, and 1 in 12 men are colorblind. I created an outlet to demonstrate what it is like to be colorblind and how this impacts people. This includes a mobile webpage that opens into a variety of Snapchat filters depicting what the world looks like if you have a certain color blindness. The purpose is to educate people on how the world appears to people with colorblindness, and to leave the site understanding and empathizing more with color blindness than when they started.

Project Year
2021

Instructor
Ashley Scrivener

The goal of the website is to guide the user to pick which type of colorblindness they want to experience but give a little foresight before launching the Snapchat filter. Rather than having the descriptions come up before, I decided to make the process more of a journey. Instead of being educated ahead of time, the user selects the category of colorblindness, experiences what it will look like, and then comes back to the website.

Creating the actual filter required something called a “Base Lookup Table”. A series of squares depicting all color hues, this bar is how to create color corrected filters. To create the different filters, I color corrected an image to replicate the type of colorblindness, placed the Base Lookup Table under the filters, and saved it as a new image. When submitting this to Lens Studio (Snapchat’s filter making hub), the software compares the original hues to the filtered hues and thus creates a color corrected filter.

Even with careful research and multiple user tests, it’s still hard to know what to expect when releasing a new product to an audience. After about a week post launching these filters, I was excited to be notified by snapchat that the filters were going viral! The filters have found an audience, and still steadily climb up in number in views, shares, and favorites. The highest success filter is Tritanopia with over 32,000 plays. This project inspired me to focus a lot of my efforts towards creating accessible designs. Feel free to try out these filters for yourself!