Figure 1: Designing for differences in colour vision, such as colour vision deficiency poses challenges for designers.To assist with this a wide body of academic literature has been developed.Given a piece of digital visual media (Left) this assistance either provides designers tools to enable adaptation (Middle-Top) or guidelines to follow (Middle-Bottom).The intended outcome of these aids is digital designs accessible to those with colour vision deficiency (Right).This survey collates and analyses these approaches.

By far the most available assistive tool to assist people with Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD) is recolouring. However, despite over three decades of research designing and developing recolouring tools, no work yet has looked to understand how these tools are actually used or perceived by people with CVD. To address this, we first analyzed posts and comments from the r/colorblind subreddit in order to get an unconstrained understanding of the perspectives people with CVD have on recolouring tools. We then conducted an observation study with follow-on interview to further understand how people with CVD use and perceive these tools in a more controlled setting. Our findings suggest that recolouring tools are rarely used how their designers intended and that a better future solution is to design with true inclusivity by solving the actual problems people with CVD have, rather than attempting to ‘fix’ CVD.

Identification of and discrimination between colours is an important task in everyday life, but for the 5% of the population who have Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD), correctly identifying or discriminating between colours can be difficult or impossible. Colour Identification (or CVD) Aids have been developed to assist people with CVD, however, the methods used to evaluate them are often limited and many use CVD simulations instead of participants with CVD. To address this, we propose two new CVD Aid evaluation tasks and show that they can assist in providing a more thorough evaluation of potential CVD aids. In addition, we evaluate the effectiveness of CVD simulations used by non-CVD people in providing results similar to those for people with CVD, and found that both the results and participant behaviour often differed. Our results indicate that greater care is needed when evaluating CVD Aids.

Many daily tasks rely on accurately identifying and distinguishing between different colours. However, these tasks can be frustrating and potentially dangerous for people with Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD). Despite prior work exploring how pattern overlays on top of colours can support people with CVD, the solutions were often unintuitive or required significant training to become proficient. We address this problem by creating two new colour patterns (ColourIconizer, ColourMix). We evaluated these patterns against a previously published colour pattern (ColourMeters) using an online evaluation with three new colour identification tasks (Selection Task, Transition Task, Sorting Task). ColourMeters helped with the Transition Task, but struggled with the Selection and Sorting Tasks. Conversely, ColourIconizer helped with the Selection and Sorting Tasks but struggled to help on the Transition Task. ColourMix provided general assistance on all tasks. Our combined results help inform and improve the design of future colour patterns.

Colour identification is an important component of perception, but people with Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD) have trouble with colour identification tasks. Haptic colour identification aids exist but are slow to learn. To address this, we developed two new colour identification aids - ColourWrist and ColourVest. Colour-Wrist is a wrist-based aid that maps any single RGB input to 16 unique colour category patterns displayed on the wrist using four solenoids and a vibration motor. ColourVest is a back-based aid that uses a back-mounted 10 x 8 2D vibrotactile array to notify the user of the general location of a user-selected colour category (of 16 possible choices). We compared both tools to a control condition with two participants with CVD, and show that participants found ColourWrist and ColourVest "intuitive" and "useful". Based on participants' feedback, we next plan improvements for ColourWrist and ColourVest, as well as plan to study how they perform in real-world applications.