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Colorblind Web Page Filter

June 12, 2024

While reading what makes a good school library website in School library website during shelter in place by Moorfield-Lang, H. and Craddock, I. M. (2020), I came across a web tool that allows the user to view a site with color filter as if seeing it from the eyes of a color blind person. Even though this is a very simple tool, I would like to write down what I have observed .

I decided to give a try with this web tool since it was brought to my attention by a resource for this course. The article brought up this web tool in the context of suggesting ways to improve the school library websites. Moorfield-Lang, H. and Craddock, I. M. (2020) pointed out that color blindness would affect a person's ability to read in-graphic text and provided the link for a web tool that allows you to check a website. It seems a good advice from an authentic source, so I followed the link and played with the tool.

Colorblind Web Page Filter Testing Tool & Simulator | Toptal®

It was a fun and novel experience to use this tool for different sites to my inexperienced eyes. First I tried the tool for my own blog page. It changed the light green color of the background design to a light brown color. Next I tried the color filter with an actual library website. The library site had several colorful images. When the color filter Protanopia was applied, all the purple color changed to blue, the orange changed to grey, but the yellow color remained the same. When the filter Tritanopia was applied, the blue color stayed the same, but purple changed to red, and yellow was gone, and replaced by white and grey. It was as if it was touched by a magic wand or washed over by a big brush. 

It's a quick and easy tool to use. It converts a site instantly and shows the original site with the color filtered site side by side.






So far I have not detected missing texts or graphics in any sites when I used this tool. But I can imagine a situation where a part of the content becomes invisible when color filter is applied. In a school library setting, it would be a good idea to test a new web site with this tool. Since the website for a school library is used by everyone in the school community, we cannot know if someone is color blind and his/her experience of the website could be impacted by this condition. The onus is on the creator of the website to see that colors are properly used, and with this handy tool, we just have to run a quick test.

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