Sim Daltonism

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Sim Daltonism 1.0.3 (84 Kb): Released on September 4, 2007.

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Description

Sim Daltonism is a color blindness simulator for Mac OS X. It filters in real-time the area around the mouse pointer and displays the result — as seen by a color blind person — in a floating palette.

Since there are many types of color blindness, Sim Daltonism allow you to choose the one you want to see. Available filters are:

Monochromacy (complete)
Monochromacy (partial): Complete or partial inability to distinguish colors. This color blindness is pretty rare.
Protanopia (complete red-green)
Protanomaly (partial red-green): Complete or partial inability to see using long-wavelength sensitive retinal cones making hard to distinguish between colors in the green-yellow-red section of the spectrum.
Deuteranopia (complete red-green)
Deuteranomaly (partial red-green): Complete or partial inability to see using middle-wavelength sensitive retinal cones making hard to distinguish between colors in the green-yellow-red section of the spectrum. This is the most common form of color blindness.
Tritanopia (complete blue-yellow)
Tritanomaly (partial blue-yellow): Complete or partial inability to see using short-wavelength sensitive retinal cones making hard to distinguish between colors in the blue-yellow section of the spectrum.

Note that I do not claim to have perfect or near-perfect color blindness simulation filters. This depends on correct screen calibration and other factors I cannot control. I have limited means, but will do what I can to improve the reliability of the filter. (Contact me if you think you can help.)

This application is offered freely in an attempt to allow myself and other to ensure web and other designs are usable by color blind people.

Requirements

Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later.

Known Issues

When you move the pointer near Sim Daltonism filter window, you will see near-endless repeatitions of the image around that window, just like if you were shooting with a video camera at a TV with showing the live image from that same camera. This isn’t a bug per se, but I agree it can be distracting.
By comparing results with the Colorblind Web Page Filter (see link below), it would seem that some regions of the filtered spectrum appear whiter than they should. This is consistent with other reports I’ve seen. I’m not sure about how to solve these problems right now.

Version History

Version 1.0.3 (September 4, 2007)

Performance enhancements in the screen capture process.
Fixed an issue which prevented capture of screens set to thousand of colors.
The application now works correctly when a scaling factor is applied to the user interface. (Note that until Mac OS X is updated, you need the the developer tools to apply a scaling factor.)
Previous version of Sim Daltonism, despite what was claimed, did not work natively on Macs with Intel processors due to a build error. This is now fixed.

Version 1.0.2 (March 6, 2006)

Clicking on Sim Daltonism’s dock icon will now open a new window if none was already open.
Sim Daltonism is now a universal application that can work nativly on Mac OS X for Intel processors.

Version 1.0.1 (October 3, 2005)

Fixed an issue that prevented Sim Daltonism from working on some G3 processors.
Disabled the “zoom” button to prevent full-screen maximixation of the window which, unless you have a second screen, doesn’t make much sense.
Clicking on the filter panel will now make appear Sim Saltonism menu bar.

Version 1.0 (September 6, 2005)

First version of Sim Daltonism.

Credits

Early versions of Sim Daltonism were using MagnifiedView (Copyright © 2003 Dave Keck) for the screen capture code. That code has been rewritten entirely in version 1.0.3 to work with Mac OS X on Intel and support UI scaling.