Accommodating color blind computer users

Important visual information often disappears when color documents are viewed by color blind people. The algorithm introduced here maps colors using the World Wide Web Consortium evaluation criteria so that detail is preserved for color blind viewers, especially dichromats. The algorithm has four parts: 1) select a representative set of colors from the source document; 2) compute target color distances using color and brightness differences; 3) solve an optimization step that preserves the target distances for a particular class of color blind viewer; and 4) interpolate the mapped colors across the remaining colors in the document. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method using simulations and critique our method in the context of earlier work.