HELP is at hand for colour blind or visually impaired people who have trouble
picking the right-coloured, or non-clashing, clothes from their wardrobe. At the
touch of a button, the hand-held ColorTalk gadget from Hokkei Industry of
Kanazawa, Japan, will identify the colour of any garment and tell you鈥攊n
Japanese鈥攚hat it is. Further language versions are planned, the company
says.
The device is about the size and weight of a mobile phone, and will read out
the colour of any object held up to its sensor. ColorTalk recognises 13 standard
colours, combined with several modifiers such as 鈥渂right鈥� and 鈥渄ark鈥�, to give up
to 220 different hues.
Meanwhile, Colorfield Digital Media in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has come up
with a software package, called a colour deficiency simulator, that tells
product designers in all fields what their designs will look like to someone who
is colour blind. The idea is to help avoid designs that might
confuse鈥攚hether they are for traffic signs or trainers.
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James Grandy of Colorfield says attempts to emulate colour blindness go as
far as back as filters produced in 1857 by the Scottish scientist James Clerk
Maxwell. But these efforts were inaccurate because the precise wavelengths of
light that are often lost in colour blindness have only recently become known,
Grandy says.
There are many different kinds of colour blindness, says Grandy. 鈥淭he three
we are simulating are the most common.鈥�