Recognize and name colors
with Colorful

Designed by 3 Computer Science students from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Colorful uses color interpretation and compensation algorithms and augmented reality technologies that may be integrated into almost every mobile smart phone device. Thanks to the intuitive user interface and straight-forward design, Colorful has won the WPAppItUp contest from Microsoft Corporation and was elected as the Editor’s choice.

Colorful boasts three major features that practically turn it into a one-stop shop:

1. Recognize colors with 4 different naming levels, ranging from your basic colors (i.e. Red, Green, Blue, Yellow etc.) and up to a full dictionary of 16.5 Billion color values (Hexadecimal notation).
2. Tag your favorite or most important colors with a name of your choosing! This comes in very handy when you are out shopping for clothes and want to find a shirt in that special color you look so good in. All you have to do is when you see a color you want to remember, tag it with a meaningful name and then next time you see it Colorful will let you know!
3. Daltonize the colors on the screen according to your own type of color blindness (Protanopia, Deuteranopia, Tritanopia). You can use this filter on the live camera feed or with a photo. Never again pick up a bad batch of bananas!

Daltonized image (right) for color blind users

As a first step, the application was made publicly available on September 20th 2011 on the Windows Phone Marketplace and can be used on any Windows Phone 7 that runs the latest operating system (Mango, 7.5). Down the road, the developers inform that they intend on posting the application to more mobile platforms including Android, iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) and the upcoming Windows 8 OS.

Windows Phone 7 users may get Colorful for FREE on the windows Marketplace and may choose to upgrade it for a small fee to gain additional functionality. Get it here (both Free and premium versions are available).

Having a closer look into the different Apps designed around color vision deficiency I found 5 types or categories which can be used to describe them. Most helpers can be found in the group of ColorNaming. But there are also some interesting tools around CVD Simulation or even CVD Compensation/Daltonizing.

• ColorNaming: Name a color from an image or the live picture while usually pointing to it. Some even speak the color or use some special algorithms to get the best fit. There is also a huge range in available color names.
• CVDSimulation: Simulate the different types of color vision deficiency. This is similar to my online tool Coblis — Color Blindness Simulator.
• CVDCompensation: In some form try to help colorblind people by adjusting certain colors so you can recognize them. Some even use some enhanced algorithms known as Daltonize.
• MatchingColors: Find colors on a picture which match to the one you chose.
• ColorHarmonies: Find harmonizing colors. This is certainly a perfect guide for all of us color blind, when we try to find an outfit that fits together!

I suppose HueVue: Colorblind Tools needs to be mentioned specially, as this is the only App which includes not only all of those five categories but it also the only one which tries to give some hints in color harmonies! And on top of that it’s even free to use. So if you have a look into those tools don’t miss that one.

Personally I don’t have an iPhone and didn’t test any of those Apps. So the descriptions are taken from the Apps pages and just altered to fit in. If you have any experience with one or even some of those Apps, please share your knowledge with us in the comments section.

HueVue: Colorblind Tools by AppFoundry (Free App)

HueVue is a color tool for the iPhone that helps people with color vision deficiencies (commonly referred to as color blindness) to identify, match and coordinate colors. If you or someone you know has trouble with colors, or if you’re interested in a cool color identification, matching and coordination tool, then HueVue is for you!

ColorBlinds Easy by R2Pro BV

ColorBlinds Easy is the easy to use tool to help you as a colorblind person to distinguish colors and gain understanding and respect from family and friends for your color deficit by simulation. Daltonize is a method to improve contrast between red and green and with Simulate you can show your family and friends what your world looks like.

Type: CVDSimulation, CVDCompensation

Colorblind Helper by Zip Zest

Colorblind? Unsure or confused about the color of things. Quickly find out what colors others see and what they call them with Colorblind Helper. With its simple and easy to use interface there’s no more wondering whether you’re wearing a green tie with a red shirt, or a green tie with a green shirt.

Type: ColorNaming, MatchingColors

Chromatic Vision Simulator by Kazunori Asada (Free App)

The “Chromatic Vision Simulator” is a chromatic simulation tool. It makes a simulated video of each chromatic from the built-in camera and shows you how people with a specific type of color vision deficiency is seeing the world and this in real-time.

Type: CVDSimulation

Colorblind Vision by opcoders.com

Transform your iPhone into a real-time color blindness vision device! This app simulates the most severe color vision deficiencies. It’s all in real-time. Just launch the app and look at the world around you through your iPhone. You will experience how red and green colors all becomes yellow and brown.

Type: CVDSimulation

Chromatic Glass by Kazunori Asada (Free App)

“Chromatic Glass” divides the color spectrum into segments so that such colors do not overlap depending on the type of color deficiency a user suffers from. It adjusts lightness and chromaticity of color segments in real-time to further help users to identify colors.

Type: CVDCompensation

Color Blind Aid by iDisrupt.com

The Color Blind Aid iPhone app enables people with red-green color blindness to detect red and green in their environment and pass color blindness tests in real-time using augmented reality technology. Adjust sensitivity of red or green detection for indoor, outdoor, virbrant, dull, or test conditions.

Type: CVDCompensation

Colorblind by ChewSoft

Colorblind is a game that challenges your ability to memorize and create colors. The premise of the game is simple; after being shown a color, and you must reproduce it. You have a series of ‘lifelines’ at your disposal that add to your strategy…but in the end…only you can determine whether or not you are truly ‘Colorblind’.

Type: Game

Kolorami by Comparatel (Free App)

Kolorami analyses colours of a picture for the pleasure or to help partially sighted persons. Regular mode uses the camera to analyse the colors of what is in its visual field. The other mode ‘Screenshots ‘ allows you to reach photographs or screenshots stored in the library, to analyse colors.

Type: ColorNaming

iSpectrum Color Blind Assistant by Wishbone Apps

Colorblind? You are not alone! Nearly one in twelve men, and one in one hundred women are colorblind. But you’re in luck: iSpectrum quickly and easily identifies any color by name! Simply touch your photo wherever you need to know the color and shake your device to reveal the RGB (Red/Green/Blue) components of any color.

Type: ColorNaming

ColorBlind Assistant by Brook Seaton

Use your iPhone or iPod Touch’s photo library to quickly identify colors. Quickly draw a circle around the test area. The app performs the following:
- identifies the hue, saturation and lightness
- percentage of the test area
- highlights the identified pixels

Type: ColorNaming

Color Reader by IRLMobile Software (Free App)

Color Reader is an innovative concept allowing the user to “touch” camera live video to know the color of something. This is a fantastic way for people who are color blind to check colors. This app has been especially designed using the iPhone accessibilities feature.

Type: ColorNaming

Say Color by HotPaw Productions (Free App)

Speaks the name of the nearest color in the center of a camera preview pane using speech synthesis. If you lock the exposure and color balance while aiming at something medium neutral gray under your current scene’s lighting, the color naming scheme will be more accurately centered in the RGB gamut.

Type: ColorNaming

ColorIn by Stephen Sullivan (Free App)

ColorIn detects colors with the iPhone camera. Simply point your camera and take a picture and ColorIn will tell you what the most dominant color is for that part of your image.

Type: ColorNaming

Colorblind Avenger by Brian Wardle

The perfect tool for anyone who is colorblind. Now you’ll be able to identify the color of anything just by taking a picture of it with your iPhone! Touch anywhere on the image to see the color of that area. Displays color names and shades as well as rgb decimal and hex values. Designed to be quick and easy to use!

Type: ColorNaming

Color Curious by Vais Salikhov

Ever looked at something and wandered what color it is? Want to know what name best describes the color you see – or the color you cannot see due to color blindness? Whether you are simply curious, or truly unable to perceive differences between certain colors, Color Curious is for you.

Type: ColorNaming

ColorHelper by Svep Design Center AB

ColorHelper is a small utility designed with the colorblind in mind, but its also of use for anyone interested in knowing the RGB color value for a specific spot in an image. Choose an existing photo or take a photo with the built-in camera, and select a spot where you would like to know the color value.

Type: ColorNaming

ColorBlind Suite by Threeplicate

This application helps you find colors in real-time (augmented-reality) from your iPhone’s camera or photos in your library. There are two modes:
- Live Mode: Play with images directly coming from your iPhone’s camera
- Static Mode: Use images from your photo library or take a new photo

Type: ColorNaming

ColorDetect by sunset software Ltd Liab. Co

The ColorDetect iPhone app gives you the possibility to detect colors in real time using augmented reality technology. The name and the RGB values of the detected colors are displayed in real time on the user interface. ColorDetect detects the colors with a 5 point detection algorithm to improve the detection quality.

Type: ColorNaming

aidColors by Tilenus Consultores, S.L.

aidColors is an application that allows visually impaired to identify the color of things. Also can be a funny game for children. aidColors allows to perform an easy and fast color recognition by means of the iPhone camera.

Type: ColorNaming

I took this as a hint to have a closer look at the question what you are willing to pay if some treatment would be available which could do that job. We are not that far yet. But there are some promising tests with monkeys which showed that genetic injections into the eye can help them to get back what they are missing—a third color receptor.

So let’s assume such a treatment would also be available for us and answer the following question—but only if you are colorblind yourself!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Maybe this poll still doesn’t show the truth because I assume that younger people might not be able to afford a high price and older people would have done it earlier in their lives, but not anymore. What do you think? Would you have payed for it, if only it would have be available ten or twenty years ago? Please leave your comments as it would be very interesting to hear your opinion on this.

The poll is running for the whole month of December. So stay tuned for the results in January while subscribing to Colblindor.

There are some genetic experiments taking place to increase the color vision for colorblind people. The tests look really exiting and the results look promising. But nobody knows yet, how much of a perfect human color vision you—as a colorblind fellow—could gain through this genetic treatment. And of course nobody knows yet how big the price tag would be for it.

There are also tools available like colored contacts or Seekey and other possibilities to help colorblind people are under development. But are they worth the price?

On the other side many colorblind people have the dream to once become a pilot (or firefighter, or policeman, …), and would be willing to pay for a cure of their handicap. Unfortunately we have no clue yet, if any future treatment or tool will ever be able to give us back a color vision good enough to pass the requirements which are in use today. Of course, we can look into changing those requirements, but that’s another story.

The following poll is for colorblind people only—sorry:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

To answer the above question you might have to know what I mean by improving your color vision ability. I would say this is something between being able to answer our most annoying game “what color is this?” and curing it completely. I don’t talk about curing color blindness here on purpose, as it is interesting to see if you would also pay money for an improvement of your color vision.

The poll is running for the next ten days. So stay tuned for the results and the follow up poll about how much money people pay for curing color blindness while subscribing to Colblindor.

ColorAdd Basic Color Shapes

The system is based on three basic color shapes representing the primary colors blue, yellow, red and two forms for black and white. While mixing those basic graphics like you would mix colors themselves this results in a list of 21 basic colors including lighter (mixing in white) and darker (mixing in black) shades.

21 Basic Color Codes of the ColorAdd System

This is it. Some more shapes for grey, silver and gold, but nothing else. That’s the whole ColorAdd system. At the first glance this is really simple and easy.

The designer claims that you don’t really have to memorize all those shapes as it works like mixing real colors. If you know the basic shapes you’re all set. In a way that’s true. But as I’m not that good on mixing colors—remember I am colorblind—I have to think about it twice if I’m right with my color mixture guess.

• Simple: Yes. But somewhere you have to explain the system in my language as the symbols can’t easily be associated with the right colors.
• Intuitively: No. Why don’t you use some sort of symbols which everybody associates with a certain color like fire, water and sun?
• Nice design: Yes. Yes I like it. Simple shapes, they are nice to look at.
• Robust usage: No. Hold some of them upside down and you will get the wrong color.

But the most important question to answer is: Can this color coding system be an added value for color blind people? This is what the designer claims and what it is actually all about. I don’t think so. Here are a few examples in my everyday life to support my point of view:

1. The banana couldn’t change such a shape if it turns ripe. A big issue for me.
2. Red/green led lights often already include some icon to show you something. So you can’t enhance them with another one and I’ll never know if it’s red or green.
3. Ok, I would know if my shirt is blue or green. But I’m still not sure if it matches my purple tie or red trousers.
4. And in most cases already now the manufacturers could add some sort of icon or pattern to help colorblind users in many situations. But they don’t do it and such a color code wouldn’t be easier to decipher than some simple icons.

Nice but unusable for me. I would be very glad if I get proven wrong in the future, if ColorAdd starts to get used and enhances my life in some way I can’t see yet.