Monday 26 November 2012

How do you know if ‘colour will help?’


How do you know if ‘colour will help?’
In the model I have developed, it is not really a ‘colour’ which helps a person. It is the reduction in stimulation of particular cone cell types in the retina; for example the red cones.


Of course you might need a different font size before you notice any difference between them.



The graph above is for a person when their font size had been optimised already and when the screen brightness had already been optimised.
Slight changes in the red pixel brightness had a huge effect on reading performance.

If a cyan filter had been used with a person in inappropriate conditions or the wrong font size I may have not given any benefit.

So to restate.  The reasons a set of coloured filters might not have given benefit can be any one or a combination of the following.

  1. Font size wrong
  2. Ambient lighting wrong
  3. The filters took too much or too little of red, green or blue light out.


As a final point I will consider the blue component of the light.  From our experience, very few people need this reducing compared with say the red or the green.   Most people end up with a sort of ‘mucky cyan’ or a ‘mucky purple’.  What you would call a ‘colour’ something like ‘Rose’ is actually a filter which reduces the amount of green light, and slightly reduces the blue.  A ‘pink’ filter would take out a different amount of green but also a different amount of blue. 

The filter sets used were originally created to test the idea that ‘different colours’ might benefit different people. 

A computer screen is a precise instrument with which to work out/calculate what will work for a person.  It is the best medium to find out what really works.

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