Did you know that colour blindness affects approximately 8 percent of all men in America? That means 1 out of every 12 American men is colourblind! On the other hand, only 0.4 percent of women in America are colour-blind, which is significantly less.

I am not sure if the same statistics apply for Singapore. For a population in which more than 70 percent of all adults are myopic, we already have our fair share of vision problems. I personally do not know anyone who’s colour-blind.

Since a third of all visitors to Sparklette are Americans, I figured some of them may actually be colourblind. As a designer, I am curious as to how this website looks to a colour-blind person. So I downloaded this Photoshop filter to find out.

To a person who’s not colourblind, this is what Sparklette looks like:

sparklette.net as seen by a person not affected by colour blindness

(Okay, I get that the screenshot isn’t entirely necessary, but it’s here for easy comparison.)

There are different kinds and levels of colour blindness. This is how the site looks to a protanope (I swear, I am not calling anyone names!):

sparklette.net as seen by a person affected by red-green colour blindness (protanopia)

A person with protanopia can’t differentiate between red and green hues. Another form of red-green colour blindness is deuteranopia:

sparklette.net as seen by a person affected by red-green colour blindness (deuteranopia)

Those two look rather similar since they are both forms of red-green colour blindness. I can’t really tell any difference except that in deuteranopia, the red hues seem closer to the actual colours.


For blue-yellow colour blindness, or tritanopia, this is how this website appears:

sparklette.net as seen by a person affected by blue-yellow colour blindness (tritanopia)

Then, there is the most extreme form of colour blindness known as achromatopsia. That’s total colour-blindness. The person sees only grey tones:

sparklette.net as seen by a person affected by total colour blindness (achromatopsia)

How terrible to not see the world in colour!