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I want to add color blindness support on my Unity game, for this, the Color Grading effect appears to be the way to go.

This is the neutral lookup table, i.e. when applied, nothing changes, it's passthrough.

enter image description here

In Photoshop, using View/Proof Setup menu I can effectively simulate some color blindness like so:

enter image description here

But the resulting image cannot be exported, the above being a screen capture.

Question:

Which software or tool could help me achieve this?

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  • I strongly encourage you to look into options other than color correction. What matters is that people with CVD can still differentiate UI elements properly, not that they (theoretically) perceive colors the way you think they should. The single most inclusive option is to let the user choose colors, even if just for critical UI elements. By doing that and following best practices for design (in particular, color should not be the only thing conveying information, and everything should have good contrast) you’ll end up making most people with CVD (or other vision problems) much happier.
    – Austin Hemmelgarn
    Apr 14 at 16:49
  • Yes, we discussed about that down below. Thing is, it's better than nothing when you have no control over the produced assets making the user interface (my case).
    – aybe
    Apr 15 at 5:26

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I'm not sure you are fully understanding what the Photoshop simulation is showing you here. It shows you what these colours look like for someone with colour blindness. You can't export this as it's only a preview, and it wouldn't be any use anyway. It is simply showing how a colour blind person will see the colours, it's not a solution or some kind of filter you can add to help colour blind people to differentiate colours. You are kind of trying to do this backwards.

Colour blindness support would be achieved by checking that your designs still work if someone is colour blind. That would likely mean you'd need to manually adjust the colours in your design, then check if it still looks OK when you simulate colour blindness. I don't think there is a way to automate this. There are just too many variables involved - not just colours. There are many other factors that can affect colour blind accessibility, such as contrast, layout, graphics, not to mention the fact that there are also several different kinds of colour blindness.

One method that might simply things a bit is to view your designs in monochrome (black and white). If it still works/functions and you can still differentiate the various functions easily, then it will probably also be accessible to a colour blind person. If there are issues, concentrate rather on the contrast between different elements, to make them easier to differentiate.

One of the basic rules of accessibility is to try (where possible) not to rely on colour alone to communicate with your users. Some things are always going to cause some issues though. For example, if you are using colours for charts/maps/graphs which rely on a colour key of some kind, or perhaps even a graphics heavy application such as a game. It might be better to have an option to change the display to a high contrast mode.

There is also a software tool called Visolve which claims to be able to help colour blind people by adjusting colours on a computer display to make them more easily distinguishable given the various colour blindness conditions. Perhaps this is something you might want to look into.

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  • I definitely agree with you on that one, in the end, doing so is just a cheap fix as most operating systems do (e.g. Windows 10+ color blindness setting); they do apply a full-screen filter and that's all, they don't actually change the colors of their UI elements.
    – aybe
    Apr 14 at 3:46
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    Note that this is not how colorblind people actuallly do see the colours, but only a preview in which you can compare contrast of the colours in the image.
    – jiwopene
    Apr 14 at 12:50
  • @jiwopene - yes it's a simulation so that people with full colour vision can "kind of" see how a colour blind person perceives the world. But you are right, it doesn't show the colours as colour blind people might actually perceive them.
    – Billy Kerr
    Apr 14 at 13:40
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G'MIC filter collection (freeware) does it:

enter image description here

Krita's basic installation contains G'MIC. It's available as a plugin for GIMP, Paint.NET and Photoshop.

If you work with indexed color mode images you must convert to RGB to use the filter. You can convert back later. Krita does not support indexed colors, so you must use for ex. GIMP to do the job.

I guess you find a way to copy the color index from one image to another but I'm not competent in that area.

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    This won't work. It's only a simulation of colour blindness - it shows how colour blind people will see the image. This is not a solution to choosing which colours will be accessible to a person who is colour blind.
    – Billy Kerr
    Apr 13 at 11:56
  • @BillyKerr sure but you can use the results for stadard contrast analysis. though youd be better of using aggregate formulas for vision impaired instead
    – joojaa
    Apr 13 at 14:55

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