Color blindness simulator

See a palette the way readers with protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia or achromatopsia see it, and get told which pairs collapse into each other.

A photograph

The same picture through each kind of color vision. Green against red is where most of it goes.

The sample photograph as seen with typical vision
Typical visionthe reference
The sample photograph as seen with deuteranopia
Deuteranopiaabout 1 in 16 men
The sample photograph as seen with protanopia
Protanopiaabout 1 in 100 men
The sample photograph as seen with tritanopia
Tritanopiaabout 1 in 10,000
The sample photograph as seen with achromatopsia
Achromatopsiavery rare

Your palette

The colors you actually ship, run through the same simulation. A pair that ends up the same fill has lost whatever it was signalling.

Palette
Typical visionthe reference
Deuteranopiaabout 1 in 16 men
Protanopiaabout 1 in 100 men
Tritanopiaabout 1 in 10,000
Achromatopsiavery rare
Every pair here stays distinguishable in all four simulations. That is a floor rather than a guarantee: color alone should still never be the only signal.

Questions

How is the simulation done?+

Each color is converted to linear light and passed through the standard confusion matrix for that deficiency, then converted back. It is the same approach the well-known simulators use.

What counts as a collision?+

A pair that is distinguishable normally but falls under a 1.2:1 contrast ratio once simulated. Below that the two fills are effectively the same color, so anything you signalled with them is gone.

What should I do about a collision?+

Carry the meaning twice. A label, an icon, a pattern or a difference in lightness all survive every deficiency, and lightness in particular is what the simulations here leave intact.

Related tools

The tools are free. So is most of the library.

1935 blocks and 989 pieces for shadcn/ui and Tailwind, built on the same tokens these tools write. Install one with a command and the code is yours.

No signup for the tools. MIT for free blocks, commercial licence for Pro.

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