safe-dye

What is this?

A small Javascript package that helps identify if two colors are distinguishable to individuals with different kinds of color blindness.

How this works

Given two Hex RGB codes, we can create two simulated RGB codes. These would be the colors seen by a color blind person, depending on color blindness type. Using DeltaE2000 algorithm, we determine if the simulated colors are distingushable. If two simulated colors are not distinguishable, we say that the original colors are not distingushable to the color blind.

Installation & Usage

Install with npm

npm install safe-dye

Usage

After requiring, use any of the available validation functions on a set of 2 colors in HEX, i.e #00A55A. The function will return true if the colors are distinguishable or false otherwise.

const SafeDye = require('safe-dye');

// Will return true if color1 and color2 are distinguishable for red-green type color blindness (Protanopia)
SafeDye.validateRedGreen(color1, color2);

// Will return true if color1 and color2 are distinguishable for blue-yellow type color blindness (Tritanopia)
SafeDye.validateBlueYellow(color1, color2);

// Will return true if both validateRedGreen and validateBlueYellow return true
SafeDye.validate(color1, color2);

// Will return true if color1 and color2 are distinguishable for normal color vision
SafeDye.validateNormal(color1, color2);

Why I made this

As a frontend developer, I sometimes find myself working on interfaces that allow users to customize color related options. As a simple example, consider choosing the color of text over a different background color for a blog post. While there are various tools out there to simulate color blind vision, we cannot expect our end users to use them when writing a colorful blog post :) With this library, we can provide users with feedback and let them know that certain color combinations can be problematic for some audiences.

Attributions

This library uses color-blind and DeltaE, which makes this package very simple. Both do a great job in educating about color blindness and visual perceptions of colors - super cool and worth checking out :)

References

1. About the DeltaE algorithm
2. Designing Colorblind Friendly Websites