PALETTE × 8 CVD TYPES
Color Blindness Simulator
Test an entire palette against eight forms of color vision deficiency at once. See whether your "red error" and "green success" collapse into the same color for the 5% of users who can't tell them apart.
Typical vision
Prevalence: 92%
Deuteranomaly
Prevalence: 5.0% (men)
Deuteranopia
Prevalence: 1.1% (men)
Protanomaly
Prevalence: 1.3% (men)
Protanopia
Prevalence: 1.0% (men)
Tritanomaly
Prevalence: 0.01%
Tritanopia
Prevalence: 0.008%
Achromatomaly
Prevalence: <0.005%
Achromatopsia
Prevalence: 0.003%
Why palette-level
Most simulators show one color at a time. That misses the actual problem.
When designers test for color blindness, they usually pop one color at a time into a single-color simulator, see it changes slightly, and conclude "looks fine". The real failure is not "this red looks weird" — it is "this red and this green produce identical colors under deuteranopia". Single-color tools cannot show that.
We render your whole palette across all 8 CVD types simultaneously. Two cells in the same row that produce the same color are a fail — that pair of colors is informationally indistinguishable for that user, and any UI that relies on the difference (a green-good / red-bad button, a chart legend, a status badge) will break.
The fix is rarely a different hue — it is adding a non-color signal. Icons next to status badges. Patterns or position in charts. Text labels next to legend swatches. Color is one channel of information; design that depends on color alone is design that breaks for 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women.
The eight types, ranked by prevalence
Color vision deficiency is far more common than designers tend to assume. Roughly 8% of men and 0.5% of women have some form of CVD — about 300 million people worldwide.
Red-axis (Protan: protanopia + protanomaly)
Reduced or missing sensitivity to red. Reds appear dim and shift toward dark olive or brown. About 2.3% of men. Red text on dark backgrounds becomes very hard to read; "red bad / green good" semaphores fail.
Green-axis (Deutan: deuteranopia + deuteranomaly)
The most common form — about 6% of men. Reds and greens are confused. Anomaly (mild) at 5% is the single most prevalent CVD overall. Test your palette under deuteranomaly first if you only have time for one check.
Blue-axis (Tritan: tritanopia + tritanomaly)
Rare — less than 0.01% of the population. Blues and yellows are confused. Less common as a design concern but worth checking if you ship financial dashboards or aviation tools where blue/yellow distinctions carry meaning.
Total / partial achromatopsia
Total absence (or near-absence) of color vision — the world reads in grayscale. Vanishingly rare (~0.003%) but the simulator output is identical to what your design looks like to anyone viewing it on a monochrome display, projected through a blocked-out projector, or printed without color.
Designer's checklist
Use this list before you ship a color-coded interface.
- ✓No two colors in your palette produce the same simulated hex under any row of the grid.
- ✓Status badges, error states, and alerts have an icon or text label, not just a color.
- ✓Chart series use shapes or patterns in addition to color (or labels directly on the lines).
- ✓Form validation does not rely only on a red border — there is also an icon or descriptive text.
- ✓Links in body text are underlined, not just colored differently from surrounding text.