RFC: Vision defect control suite for artwork

[David Nielsen]

During the recent debate on the new icon theme I brought the question of
testing your work against known vision defects like red/green color
blindness, blurry vision and such things.

However it does not seem that we have an easy to use tool to simulate
all these various issues, therefore I would like to propose that we work
on building one. I would be willing to dust off my coding skills and
give this a shot however I need some help figuring out the math behind
the various defects.

The rough idea would be to feed the program an image, say a screenshot
of the Fedora desktop we are working on and the program would output
images showing us how this would look to the affected people. Akin to
what vischeck[1] does but locally and using free software.

I figure starting with deuteranomaly as the proof of concept it would be
good as that covers about 6% of the male population and is the single
most common color vision defect according to my research. Ensuring that
Fedora can be used by 6% of the male population out of the box would
probably be worth a little bit of work.

I have been able to dig up all kinds of genetic details as to how this
works but not a single reference to an algorithm we could apply to the
transform operation.

So dear lazyweb, help me dig up the math and I will see what I can do
about providing a tool for the real artists to play with. That is if
there's an real interest of course.

- David

Also a fun project for someone with interest, there are means of
calculating backwards[2] to make interfaces that do hit a certain vision
impairments work for these people. It properly requires more math that
what is feasable but never the less I could see someone having a bit of
fun with realtime color transformation like that. A nice thesis subject
for some starving CS student maybe, I'd be happy to help out. I'm
thinking a Compiz plugin that adjusts the colors might do the trick. 

[1] http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/
[2] http://www.vischeck.com/daltonize/