Play With Our WebApp - ColorBlindMe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350052

by kirubakaran • 18 years ago

9 33 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

http://www.colorblindme.com/

mwerty and I met last week since we both frequent Hacker News, live in Seattle and wanted to work on something. We thought that it will be fun to create a small app... we'll get to know each other and how we work together etc... Creating this app was out and out fun. We also got many new ideas while working on this app.

Please tell us what you think. We are big boys with relatively thick skins.

Email us at dev@colorblindme.com to be a part of our inner circle :-)

markbao• 18 years ago

Great idea for usability. Bravo. Design could use a bit of work (nothing drastic, just maybe the font). And, you don't need the demo there, since your page is already one.

kirubakaran8• 18 years ago

Thanks! I agree. We'll remove that.

rsayers• 18 years ago

Cool idea, with a little work this could be a very useful tool for color seeing folk. The method you use could definitely use tweaking though, Ive seen other sites that do this which produce images that look identical to the original to me (im red/green colorblind), but with this there is a significant difference.

kirubakaran8• 18 years ago

Thanks. Yeah it is very much a work in progress.

> (im red/green colorblind)

If it is okay with you, can you please email us at dev@colorblind.com so that we can ask you to test few things for us in the future?

silencio• 18 years ago

there are a few apps out there that simulate different types of colorblindness that I find useful for testing all sorts of things (websites, apps, videos and more) when I can't easily find someone who is colorblind. you might find them useful for testing, like http://colororacle.cartography.ch/ which looks to be cross-platform (I only know of ones for OS X).

also in terms of general feedback, I love the idea and it's great for occasional use for a small set of pages, but I can't imagine using the current feature set for any significant testing and testing of anything that's not a webpage. i really love the idea of delivering the whole screen, especially without installing much beyond a firefox extension :)

visdo• 18 years ago

Then the method does not work because you see significant difference.

mwerty5• 18 years ago

The method is definitely lossy - it should be off but consistently off. i.e. the mapping is not perfect but if two colors look close to each other in our lossy mapping then they'll be close to each other in the perfect version. I'll probably update it soon anyway.

ken• 18 years ago

Nice idea, but:

I put in "milliondollarhomepage.com", and it worked. Then I put in "clayvalet.com" (my last startup), and it showed the MDH image again. Google/Amazon/whatever work fine, but "clayvalet.com" shows the "milliondollarhomepage.com" image.

mwerty5• 18 years ago

Please try again. should be fixed now.

mattjung3• 18 years ago

Got the following error: http://www.colorblindme.com/static/img_d_80ee3622d58e38042c8...

kirubakaran8• 18 years ago

Sorry about that. We have to turn off all such notifications.

NoBSWebDesign• 18 years ago

Hmm, apparently personalshopper.com uses an invalid security certificate...

http://www.colorblindme.com/static/img_s_a104f13f889b73b841b...

In your server's Firefox installation, you may want to turn off notifications.

And maybe install Flash (or not). http://www.colorblindme.com/static/img_s_f8e133dc8711169cef5...

mattjung3• 18 years ago

But what's that personalshopper.com about? I tested for a different site (dezidr.com)...

kirubakaran8• 18 years ago

It happened as we reuse the same instance of Firefox. We'll come up with a fix soon.

lux• 18 years ago

Maybe this should be a Firefox extension?

kirubakaran8• 18 years ago

Thanks :) That is one of the plans.

oofoe• 18 years ago

When I try it, there's a big Gimp install dialogue taking up most of the site snapshot. The title is "Opening Gimp-2.6.1-Leopard-Intel.dmg".

Good idea though!

crescendo• 18 years ago

Cool idea. One suggestion I would give is to remove the screenshot grabbing process from the post/response cycle and make it asynchronous. Maybe with some kind of ajax landing page that periodically checks for the screenshot's status and then displays it when done. That way, the user gets an instant result which will make the site feel faster. Also, this would eliminate any timeout errors if the screenshot machine is overburdened and takes too long to respond.

kirubakaran8• 18 years ago

Thanks. We'll do that.

LogicHoleFlaw• 18 years ago

Interestingly to me, the site of my old university sci-fi club looks almost exactly the same in both modes.

Maybe that navy-and-grey color scheme was good for something after all.

kirubakaran8• 18 years ago

Blue is good for red-green colorblindness, the most common type. I remember reading that it affects 5% of the population.

mwerty5• 18 years ago

A few points: The transform we use loses color/detail and could be prettier. There are better methods that are less lossy (and more proprietary) but this kinds/sorta works. We'll probably swap out a better one eventually (supporting other colorblindness types).

The whole architecture of taking screen shots is very hacky. We were thinking of a firefox addon to automate stuff (we could also deliver the whole screen and maybe enable flash/javascript) but would love to hear other ideas.

Atleast partially inspired by a post by Chris from wufoo: http://particletree.com/features/interfaces-and-color-blindn.... Not a bad way to spend a few evenings :) and we'd love to get some HN feedback/ideas of other related things we could do.

FredSource• 18 years ago

A bug to fix -- it does not remder images that are set as "background" through .css

kirubakaran8• 18 years ago

Oh. We'll fix it. Thanks.

geuis2• 18 years ago

I don't know much about the effects of color blindness. Does white always look like pink to those folks? Looking at Google.com via ColorBlindMe

geuis2• 18 years ago

who in the heck is voting me down for asking this question? Its an honest question that relates to color blindness for someone who isn't color blind, and it relates to whether or not this color blind tool is accurate or not.

mwerty5• 18 years ago

Thanks for the valid bug report. We noticed it too. Our translation needs work.

bdr• 18 years ago

There's a service like this at graybit.com that shows everything in greyscale. This is great for looking at your site's contrast. It doesn't seem to be working right now, though.

kevinkevin• 18 years ago

I got a plugin required for a site requiring a plugin. The site had a youtube video imbedded.

kaens• 18 years ago

Bug: It doesn't correctly handle sites on different ports than 80 (I'm guessing). http://packagedepends.homelinux.org:8080 returns a page for the University of Southhampton, not my (very) simple webapp.

Great app though.

mwerty5• 18 years ago

fixed. thanks!

evandrix• 18 years ago

test

Play With Our WebApp - ColorBlindMe

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