I Built Pharaoh Vision Because I Was Tired of Guessing Which Light Was Red

## The dashboard that nearly cost us a client

Three years ago I sat in a review meeting looking at a status dashboard that was, apparently, screaming red alerts at everyone in the room except me. Green and red dots, same size, same shape, sitting next to each other like they were part of some cruel little test. I couldn't tell you which was which. I nodded along for about four minutes before someone noticed I hadn't said a word about the thing that was, allegedly, on fire.

That's deutan-type colour vision deficiency for you. I don't see red and green the way most people do — they collapse towards each other, especially in low contrast or small doses. It's not rare. It's not a niche edge case you can deprioritise to next quarter. Roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some form of colour vision deficiency. In a room of forty people, statistically, three or four of you are quietly doing what I was doing in that meeting: nodding, guessing, hoping.

## Most "accessible" design still isn't

Here's the uncomfortable bit. Teams that genuinely care about accessibility — who've read the WCAG guidance, who run contrast checkers, who put alt text on everything — still ship colour-coded interfaces that fail people like me. Not out of laziness. Out of a much simpler problem: **the person choosing the colours can see them fine.**

A designer with typical colour vision picks a palette, it looks distinct and lovely on their screen, it passes contrast ratio checks (which measure luminance, not hue confusion), and it ships. Nobody in the chain has deutan or protan vision, so nobody catches that the "clear" red/green distinction is nearly invisible to a meaningful chunk of the audience.

The places this bites hardest, in my experience:

- **Status dots and pills.** Red/green/amber systems in ops dashboards, CI pipelines, health monitors. When something's down, I need to know instantly, not after a hover-tooltip investigation. - **Heatmaps.** Red-to-green gradients on everything from spreadsheets to marketing analytics. The whole gradient can read as one murky band. - **Transit and network maps.** London's own tube map has had colour-confusion complaints for decades — lines distinguished purely by hue, no pattern or label redundancy. - **"Colour-coded" anything.** Charts with six categories, six similar-looking lines, and a legend that assumes you can match them by eye.

The guidance has existed for years: don't rely on colour alone, add icons, patterns, labels. Some teams do this brilliantly. Most don't, because it's an extra design pass for a problem the team can't personally see — literally.

## Why I didn't want a $400 pair of glasses

The existing fix for colour blindness has mostly been specialist lenses — glasses that filter out specific wavelengths so red and green separate more. They work for some people, some of the time, for a few hundred dollars. But they're a hardware bet: one fixed filter, baked into glass, that you wear everywhere regardless of what you're actually looking at. A spreadsheet and a sunset need different correction. Glass doesn't adapt. Neither does the price tag, which puts a basic quality-of-life fix out of reach for a lot of people who'd benefit from it.

Software doesn't have that problem. A phone camera and screen can analyse what's actually in front of you, right now, and remap the colours in real time — a technique called daltonization, shifting problem hues into a range you can actually distinguish, without flattening the image into something ugly. It costs nothing to try, it updates instantly as lighting and content change, and it doesn't require you to buy a physical object and hope it suits your specific type of deficiency.

## What we built

That's Pharaoh Vision: real-time colour correction that runs on your phone, always on, free to try. Point it at a dashboard, a map, a spreadsheet, a traffic light, and it does the remapping live. It's a working web tool today — no hardware to buy, nothing to install before you can see whether it actually helps you.

We're also prototyping a hands-free version for smart glasses, for the times when holding a phone up to the world isn't practical — walking, cycling, working with your hands. That one's still in development, not something you can buy yet. I'd rather tell you it's coming than pretend it already ships.

I'm not going to pretend even the phone tool fixes bad design. It doesn't retrofit every red/green dashboard on the internet. What it does is put the correction where it belongs: with the person who needs it, under their control, at zero cost of entry. It's the difference between waiting for the industry to redesign around you and just being able to see the thing properly this afternoon.

## The actual fix is still yours to make

If you're building software, the fastest, cheapest accessibility win available to you today is simple: never let colour be the *only* signal. Add a shape, an icon, a label, a pattern. It costs you an afternoon. It costs colour-blind users nothing to benefit from it, forever.

Until more teams do that, there's Pharaoh Vision. Try it free, see what you've been missing, and tell us where it breaks.