Microsoft's Color Binocular App Helps People With Colour Blindness Distinguish Colours

'When I’m cooking and I need to brown meat, I can bust it out so I can tell when it’s not pink anymore!'

A colour blind software engineer at Microsoft has built an app which helps people with the condition to see a full spectrum of colours.

Tom Overton’s Color Binocular brightens yellows, reds, greens and blues to compensate for an inability to distinguish between the hues naturally.

Microsoft

Neither Overton nor his co-developer Tingting Zhu had built an app before. Zhu revealed the inspiration for the service in a blogpost:

“We read about special lenses that helped colorblind people distinguish colors. However, that’s expensive. So we thought, let’s code something on a phone for free.”

The app offers three viewing modes – red and green, green and red, and blue and yellow and is available for free on Apple.

Overton explained that it was a personal project: “I showed it off to my family. I have a cousin who is also colorblind, and he really enjoyed it.

“Also, when I’m cooking and I need to brown meat, I can bust it out so I can tell when it’s not pink anymore!”

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