OpticQuiz — Colorblind-Safe Colors
Catch the colors that break for colorblind viewers while you code, and fix them with one click.
Red-green color-vision deficiency affects about 1 in 12 men. When a stylesheet, theme, or chart config leans on colors that look identical to them, those users just miss the meaning. This extension underlines those pairs as you type and offers a fix.
What it does
- Underlines conflicting colors. It reads the hex colors in your file, simulates protanopia / deuteranopia / tritanopia (Machado 2009), scores every pair with CIEDE2000, and warns on the pairs that are distinct to normal vision but collapse under simulation.
- Fixes them. The lightbulb — or the command OpticQuiz: Fix colors to be colorblind-safe — rewrites the offending hex values to a colorblind-safe set that stays as close to your originals as possible (it separates them in lightness, the axis color-vision deficiency preserves).
- Runs locally. The
opticquiz-cvd engine runs in-process. Nothing about your code leaves your machine.
Works in CSS, SCSS, Less, JS/TS, JSON design tokens, HTML, Vue, Svelte, Astro.
Settings
opticquiz.severity — CVD severity to check against (1 = full dichromacy / worst case; 0.5 = moderate anomalous trichromacy).opticquiz.model — machado (default) or brettel, two independent simulation models.opticquiz.collapse — the CIEDE2000 threshold below which a simulated pair counts as a conflict (default 10).opticquiz.enable — turn the underlines on/off.
Honest scope
This checks one thing: whether colors stay distinguishable under simulated color-vision deficiency. It is not a legal accessibility audit and does not certify ADA, Section 508, WCAG, or EU Accessibility Act compliance. It simulates a model of color vision, not any individual's. The method is open-access: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21310578. Same engine as the OpticQuiz checker and the palette benchmark.
License
MIT.
