Color Blindness Simulator

This simulator shows how a color looks with four types of color blindness: protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia and achromatopsia. Enter a hex code to see the simulated color for each type next to the original. Each result has a hex code you can copy.

Red-green color blindness is by far the most common kind. It is inherited on the X chromosome and affects about 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women of Northern European descent.

Most people with color blindness see plenty of color but mix up certain hues. In protanopia the red cones do not work, and in deuteranopia the green cones do not. Both make reds, greens, oranges and browns hard to tell apart. Tritanopia, a rare loss of blue cones, makes blue hard to tell from green and yellow hard to tell from red.

The simulator uses the Machado (2009) model at full strength, which shows the most severe form of each type. Many people have a milder form and see smaller shifts than shown here. Achromatopsia, a very rare total loss of color vision, is shown as a gray of the same brightness.

Use it to catch colors that collapse into one. Pure red #FF0000 and CSS green #008000 both turn into dark olive tones under protanopia, #6D5F00 and #837200. The tool takes one color at a time, so enter each color of a pair in turn. If two colors in a chart or status badge merge, add labels, icons or patterns, or make one clearly lighter. Then check text pairs with the Color Contrast Checker.