Comments for Joshua Tauberer's Blog

Comment on Try hacking for government transparency in GSoC by Dee

Dee — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 05:13:27 +0000

Not everything need to be made transparent I believe. I heard a lot about the Sunlight Foundation and some of my colleagues actively support the foundation. However, the thought of “hacking congress” does entice me in case it is constructive and well structured.

Comment on Designing accessible color spectrums by Joshua Tauberer

Joshua Tauberer — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 20:51:56 +0000

Hi, Neda! I’m not sure, but I think you may be misunderstanding the lowercase x/y variables which are image coordinates, rather than xyY. But my head explodes when I try to keep all of these coordinate systems separate and it’s been months since I’ve tried to remember how all that works.

One thing that I’ve thought about since writing this post is that actually the perpendicular lines themselves may not be optimal. What counts is the perpendicular distance. Two colors on a perpendicular will be differentiable, but if you move the second point along a confusion line they ought to remain differentiable (because the perpendicular distance will remain unchanged) but they should *gain* in distinctiveness for normal-signed viewers, which in principle is better.

Changing colors of existing things seems… really hard. To say the least. If all three dimensions of color were used in the original, it would be impossible to squeeze them into two dimensions without losing something. If I had to give it a shot, I would try changing three dimensions of color into two dimensions of color plus one dimension of something else (maybe a spatial distortion). Fun.

I find all this incredibly fascinating.

Comment on Designing accessible color spectrums by Neda Milic

Neda Milic — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:05:06 +0000

Hi, Josua. Nice work.
My master thesis was “Development of plug in for simulating and helping people with Protanopia and Deuteranopia”, and I had the same idea from the beginning – that the best contrast for dichromats is obtained if the colours are on the perpendicular line to confusion line. I had some optimizing recolouring options based on Lab (or LCH) in my plug in, but I didn’t developed any further the idea of perpendicularity because that great thing if you want to choose the optimal colour combination, but it’s not good for photographs because if when you make better contrast between some two coloured surfaces, there are large chance that you will lower contrast between those newly coloured surfaces and the rest of their neighborhood. I have one question- perpendicular lines looks like they are in right direction, but the conversion between xyY and Lab is not so simple as you wrote it in a code. See here:
xyY to XYZ
http://www.easyrgb.com/index.php?X=MATH&H=04#text4
XYZ to Lab
http://www.easyrgb.com/index.php?X=MATH&H=07#text7

Comment on Part II: We all know money is a corrupting force, right? by Robert

Robert — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:15:53 +0000

I like the way you think, and thanks for starting that government tracking site, I’m trying to publish some media and your site is a great resource. Any ideas for additional resources? I’m ALL ABOUT TRANSPERANCY, without it we don’t have democracy.

Comment on Designing accessible color spectrums by Joshua Tauberer

Joshua Tauberer — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:46:09 +0000

Hi, Michael. What I’m interested in actually is developing tools that website developers can use to choose original color pallets that are more accessible. (Creating a browser extension to revise an existing page is a considerably harder problem.) But I have a lot on my plate right now and I probably won’t get back to this for a while.

Comment on Designing accessible color spectrums by Michael Hagerty

Michael Hagerty — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 16:05:58 +0000

You mentioned you are working on something to make the color palette understandable for at least the three major types of color blindness. I am a protanope and had been using the CBext add-in to Firefox until no longer kept up with Firefox updates and am now back to having to suffer through bad color choices by web designers, e.g., “respond to the questions in red {where the font is extremely narrow and thus identical to the black thin font}”…

Since CBext is no longer supported, would you be considering something along those lines?

Comment on Who’s been visiting our Assistant Deputy CTO for Open Government? by HERBCYCLOPEDIA

HERBCYCLOPEDIA — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:22:06 +0000

I fully agree with James, people need to know this information, they have their right to be informed.

Comment on Android+Ubuntu Tethering Redux by Joshua Tauberer

Joshua Tauberer — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:33:42 +0000

Not with this method, no. It relies on being able to run openvpn on the computer needing the internet connection, which you can’t do on the Android (at least not a stock one).

Comment on Android+Ubuntu Tethering Redux by Kamil M.

Kamil M. — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 09:09:19 +0000

Is it possible to do the same but reverse (reverse tethering)? I want to share internet from my computer to android phone.

Comment on Designing accessible color spectrums by Daniel Flück

Daniel Flück — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 21:28:12 +0000

Well done! Good explanations everyone can follow.

It’s nice to see how you put the confusion lines into another color space. And I can tell you from a red-blind point of view, the arrows are pointing into the correct direction :-)