Color Blind Pal

Inspiration

This phenomenon of color blindness is not random. About 1 in 20 people are colorblind in some way. This means that one or more of the types of cone cells in their eyes — the cells we use to detect color — do not work normally. Because of this, a person who is colorblind sees a reduced color space and may cause a lot of trouble in their daily lives. Under the title of inclusivity, accessibility, and diversity, we felt it a fitting topic to highlight what disability activists have been saying for years – that you can’t be a truly diverse and inclusive society without putting disability on the agenda. Our application, “Color Blind Pal”, serves as a Chrome extension, and delivers an ultimate solution that is possible for all color-blind people to browse the Internet properly to function and create diversity, regardless of their impairments!

What it does

We strive for accessibility at the core of our community. Colorblind pal is a Chrome extension that improves the user experience for colorblind people and makes any website colorblind-friendly. The only action a user needs to take is to select their corresponding colorblind type after clicking on the plugin. For different types of users, our plugin can be adapted to their different situations. Users can also modify the plugin's settings. Optionally, they can use the extension all the time. In other words, whenever they open a new window, the extension will automatically be applied.

How we built it

We use the Google Chrome extension Manifest V3 framework to build "Color Blind Pal". We added different CSS and JavaScript files to convert a specific range of colors of the text and image to a color that can be distinguished by the corresponding type of color-blind people.

Challenges we ran into

Because none of our team members are colorblind, we have no way to visualize how users feel after using our plugin. However, we applied the online Color Blindness Simulator and experienced that the color distinction was more obvious from a colorblind person's perspective when using our plug-in.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Team management and work distribution were extremely organized during this hackathon. Every team member gets to show their unique talent in different stages of the software development process. More importantly, we managed to deliver the finished product with decent quality.