The Best Use of Augmented Reality I’ve Seen
Short and sweet – Dan Kaminsky created an app for iPhone and Android devices that allows someone who is color blind to see the world and distinguish color.
This is important to me, not because I am color blind, but because one of the engineers at Adobe who worked on PostScript (and oddly enough did the original color extensions to the language) was. This was clear in that if he was burning ROMS for an OEM customer, he had to get someone who wasn’t color blind to look at the ROM burner and let him know if any of the devices failed the check sum at the end. This is because the burner had a tri-state LED for each device to indicate what it was doing: green for good, red for fail, and yellow for burning.
This app would have freed him from that particular inconvenience.
Ultimately, the UI for the ROM programmer was wrong. Just remember:
If you are compelled to use color as a way to distinguish state to a user, you should always have at least one secondary indicator (shape, text, flashing), otherwise you are locking out potentially 10% of the population from your UI.