Color Blind Simulator

Color-vision deficiency is not an edge case. Around one in twelve men carries some form of it, the vast majority red-green, which means almost every product of any scale has color-blind users right now. The failure mode is rarely "they can't see color" — it's subtler and more dangerous: a red and a green that scream "stop" and "go" to you collapse into the same muddy tone for them, so a status dot, a chart series, a required-field highlight or a map legend that relies on hue alone simply stops communicating. Because designers overwhelmingly have typical vision, this is invisible during design — which is exactly why a simulator earns its place in the workflow.

This tool applies the Machado model — peer-reviewed CVD transforms applied in linear-light sRGB — to re-render your actual palette as deuteranopia, protanopia and tritanopia perceive it. But a filtered preview alone still leaves you guessing, so it goes further and does the math: it measures the perceptual distance between every pair of your colors under each deficiency, and flags any pair that falls below the threshold where they'd look the same. That turns "hmm, those look close" into a concrete, fixable warning.

The fix is rarely to abandon color — it's to stop making color the only signal. Pair it with text, an icon, a pattern or position, so the meaning survives even when the hue doesn't. Where you do need many distinct colors, reach for palettes engineered for this (Okabe-Ito for categories, Viridis for data) or adjust your own until no pairs merge here. And remember contrast is the other half: a deuteranope still needs luminance separation to read text, so a color-safe palette and a contrast-passing one are two checks, not one.

Run your palette through all three deficiencies here, clear the confusable pairs, then confirm text legibility in the Accessibility Checker and source distinct, coherent colors from the Palette Generator. Inclusive color isn't a constraint on good design — it's a definition of it.