Best Web Application Winner’s 2009
Sutton Park School Dublin
Our web browser is an application that we created to make browsing the web easier for people with colour blindness.
We got the idea for it from an article about the London Olympics logo, which was supposedly designed by a colour blind person. This led a colour blind friend of ours to mention how he would sometimes be unable to view a web page properly as he could not differentiate between reds and greens.
After researching how colour blindness affects people, we were very surprised to find that one in ten men lived with colour blindness, yet there were no systems in place to help them.
To fix this problem we created our web browser, which at the click of a button changes reds to purples and greens to turquoises, which colour blind people view with more contrast. We tested this browser on our computer teacher, who was colour blind, and he found that using it made it so that he could see images that he had never been able to before.
One of our main difficulties in creating this application was getting it to run smoothly, so as not to disturb the use of the browser. Another difficulty we had was finding willing test subjects, as many people with colour blindness do not know, or are unwilling to help.
We also decided to make it so that our browser could show a normally sighted person what a colour blind person would see. We did this in hopes of making our browser’s applications spread further and to help raise awareness of the difficulties colour blind people face.
