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Inspiration
One of our team members is colorblind. An example of how it affects this specific team member is the inability to differentiate red text from black text, which is a common occurrence in an academic setting. After looking online for potential solutions, the whole group searched from about fifteen minutes straight before finding something even close to a potential solution. There are roughly 300 million people worldwide that are affected by colorblindness. Despite this, being colorblind is often overlooked in an academic setting. In response, we created two projects to help people who are colorblind. We called the project ColorFind because it helps those who are colorblind find the colors they have difficulty perceiving.
What it does
Our first project is a chrome extension that filters the colors shown on-screen. Our second project is a website that takes an image and spits out a new image based off of the first one that has been modified so that it may be more easily perceived by someone who is colorblind.
How we built it
We used HTML, JavaScript and CSS for the extension, along with Python and Flask for the website. We used an algorithm called Daltonization that changes the color based on the person's deficiency (Protan, Deutan, Tritan) to a color that they can perceive easily.
Challenges we ran into
Figuring out the Daltonization algorithm was bit tricky at first. Testing our algorithm to see if it worked was quite challenging. This is because the one group member who is colorblind is of type protan. Meaning it was easy to check that specific deficiency. However in order to check deutan and tritan, we had to rethink how we would test the end results. For ease of use, we used examples from Enchroma's free-to-take colorblind test, using sample images generated to test deutan and tritan colorblindness. We also had no idea how to configure a ".tech" domain, but we figured it out.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we made a real, accessible, and free-to-use tool to help colorblind people! We were shocked when doing our prior research about how little resources there are online to help with this. The person with colorblindness on our team plans to actually use this tool in her daily life. Our group is also pleased that our website gives off the energy that it was made with love. We finished our project in under twelve hours, which is a new record for everyone that has worked in a hackathon in our group!
What we learned
We learned a lot about how colorblindness works in both everyday life and within the contexts of academia. We learned about posting from the front end to the back end in flask. We learned how to better organize our CS classes. We learned how to bundle NPM packages.
What's next for ColorFind
Our one group member who is colorblind will gladly use this throughout her life. We plan on publishing the extension to various browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc. In addition, we plan on reaching out to other people who are colorblind of type deutan and tritan so that we have user input from people who are directly affected by the issues we are trying to solve.
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