During the last year his son T.J. Waggoner started an online color vision testing possibilty together with his father. This test of course is based on the research done by Dr. Waggoner and consists of a set of pseudoisochromatic test plates. I had the possibilty to take this online color vision deficiency test and would like to give you some insights into the test and as well I would like to share my thougths about it with you.

I already reported about this new online test possibilty at Online Pseudoisochromatic Plates Color Vision Test. Since then they made some major improvements on the test and it can give you some more detailed results on your actual color vision deficiency type and severity.

So first about the test itself: It consists of four different parts, starting with a general color blindness test the second to fourth part are related to the three different main types of color vision deficiency: Protan defects, deutan defects and tritan defects. Each part has a set of pseudoisochromatic plates (the circle pictures with the dots) with some “hidden” numbers. Now what you have to do is:

1. Have a look at the plate (you’ll get only 2 seconds to do that).
2. Choose on the answer page, which number you have seen. Or choose nothing, if you haven’t seen anything at all.
3. Press Next and you’ll be shown the next plate.

At the end of the test you’ll get a result sheet which shows your correct and wrong answers for each section. On the right side you can see my personal test result.

As you can see, the four different parts are shown each seperately. I haven’t seen a lot — nothting new to me — but what I like is the extra feedback that according to this test result I’m a Severe Protan (Red-Blind), which correlates with all my other results perfectly.

Are this test results reliable?

At this point it is getting a bit more complicated. Can you believe in this result? Does it tell you the truth? Or is it just another unreliable online color vision test?

Unfortunately nobody can tell you the truth at this point. It is still very well known, that if you want to get to most precise result, you have to check your vision specialist and take an anomoloscope color vision test — the golden standard when it comes to color blindness testing.

But this new possibilty could get closer and closer to a very good result. Of course you shouldn’t cheat, but I can tell you it’s not easy (if you don’t have somebody besided you which tells your the right answer) and you would only cheat yourself anyway.

There are no academic results around yet for this new test. This always takes quite a long time. But some studies have started, it looks like if the FAA has also a look into it and some other studies try to find out if this could be a new possibilty for color vision deficiency testing.

If you would like to try out this new online color blindness test at www.Testing Color Vision.com just use my discount code «colblindor» and you’ll get 20% off!

I now that displays are differently calibrated and therefore you can get different test result while using different computers or electronic devices. But are those differences not getting smaller and smaller? And are vision specialists not as well a little bit error-prone? Which is better? — What do you think…

Based on the confusion lines of the CIE 1931 color space he made a transformation into the CIE LAB color space. In this space equal distances in the color space represent equal amounts of perceptual distance. It’s nice to see that the confusion lines which emanate from a single point in CIE 1931 are in the CIE LAP space represented by parallel lines.

The arrows in the graphic below don’t show the confusion axis but paths that go perpendicular to the confusion lines which will have maximal perceptible differences for a specific type of color vision deficiency.

Protan Spectrum Lines in CIE LAB – from razor.occams.info

There are some more nice graphics included in the article and even some code which can be used to generate those. Visit the original article at Designing accessible color spectrums.

Unfortunately I think it is still not that easy for non-colorblind people to choose good colors which are distinguishable even for the strongly color blind among us. But if you stick to less colors with large brightness differences you are always on the better side.

The site We are colorblind.com includes a lot of very interesting topics related to color blindness on the web. It is structured as follows:

Patterns for the Color Blind: A list of very useful patterns you can follow while you’re designing your web content. If you follow those patterns, colorblind people will definitely find their way around on your page.

Quick Tips: This section provides supportive information for all the patterns from the above mentioned list. If you dig into the quick tips you’ll learn more on how color blind people see the world and how you can use this information.

Color vision and web Tools: Hopefully this is an ever growing list of great tools to help you while you are building your web site or just on your way through the web.

Good and bad online Examples: The examples section gives a good overview of good solutions, which help people with color vision deficiency. The list also includes bad examples; web sites unusable by color blind visitors.

If you think about building a new web page, redesign your site or get your online content ready for colorblind visitors, make sure you visit wearecolorblind.com and follow the tips and patterns provided by Tom.

Tom: Really great work! Thanks.

Below you can see an actual screenshot of its design. Because of my almost red-blindness I have great difficulties in reading the normal text which is in a dark gray tone (is that right?). Links and titles which are white are no problem to distinguish from the background color, but when hovering over the links in a first glance they look like as if they would disappear as they are also turning gray.

Before you release your design ask yourself if you did a color blindness check, used a colorblind web page filter or made a color contrast analysis. There are many tools available to check your choice of colors; don’t wait; do it now if you didn’t do it before.

Mark Boulton started the series Five Simple Steps to designing with color where he digs into color theory and tries to give some hints how to design your web page using colors correctly.

For me, as one of the colorblind individuals among us, already the first part includes the bottom line: Begin with Gray. When I designed Colblindor I had in mind to show what it means to be colorblind and therefore I worked with colors. But when I think about this now it could be even better starting with gray tones – and maybe even stick to them. This would make it definitely readable to all the colorblind visitors and I wouldn’t have the problem not to see it like others see it.

Maybe this will be the next big thing to do: Go back to basics. But maybe Mark shows us some more interesting tips in the next steps so I’ll stick around to see what I can do to make my weblog more readable to all visitors.