accessible dashboard palette
A dashboard with four series colors (green, red, blue and amber) can look perfectly distinct to someone with normal trichromatic vision and still collapse into two or three groups for a color-blind user. This simulator applies each color vision deficiency transformation to your exact colors before you ship the chart.
Green shifts into a purplish tone, but red and amber both converge on similar olive shades, the two series read as near-twins in the chart.
Blue #2563eb is the only color that keeps clear separation across both simulations, a solid candidate as the palette anchor.
Any one of these three extra channels keeps the chart readable even when two colors collapse under simulation.
No. It approximates average perception with a mathematical model; real people vary in severity, adaptation and lighting context, and many have reduced color vision, not absent.
Because blue mostly depends on the S cone, which stays intact in both protanopia and deuteranopia, while red and amber depend on the difference between the L and M cones, exactly the ones missing in those two conditions. A hue that depends on a cone that is still present tends to survive simulation better.
Four can work, but only if each one also carries a second identification channel: a fixed legend position, a value label next to the bar, or a per-category icon. Relying on hue alone for four groups is the easiest scenario to collapse under any of the three simulations.
It is worth simulating all three, because each affects a different cone and can make a different pair of colors collide: a palette can pass cleanly under tritanopia and still collapse under deuteranopia, so approving it based on a single simulation lets through problems the other one would have caught.
It solves that specific pair, but not the general problem: any new palette still needs to go through the same simulation, because the collision depends on each color exact position in the spectrum, not on "red and green" as a fixed category. Testing case by case is still necessary.
#3DDC97#E5C46B#E07B8E#4EA8DE#F7F8F7#796DAC#D9DB86#BAC288#7069CE#F7F7F7#796DAC, #D9DB86, #BAC288, #7069CE, #F7F7F7The palette is processed locally; no color or image is sent to the server.