Color-Unclasher

Designed to help developers make their Maplibre styles more accessible to users with color blindness! This tool analyzes color combinations within a style specification and reports any non-compliant pairs. Compliance is determined by checking if the colors of two layers at the same zoom level, when transformed to simulate different types of color blindness, have a sufficient DeltaE difference.

The result could be in human readable format (written to terminal or a file) or just data structures exported to another file.

The exported file for non-compliant pairs in a specific data structure could be used to specify pairs to ignore in future analyses.

Background information

Color perceptions considered in the project

Name	Type	Cause
Normal Vision	No color blindness	Has all red, green, and blue cones
Protanopia	Red-Green blindness	No red cone
Deuteranopia	Red-Green blindness	No green cone
Trianopia	Blue-Yellow blindness	No blue cone

What is DeltaE?

DeltaE (CIE 2000) is a metric for how the human eye percieves color difference, with 0 being no difference and 100 being maximum difference. This package uses chroma.js's deltaE function, which is based on the formula from Bruce Lindbloom.

Why use DeltaE instead of color contrast ratio?

Color contrast ratio, based on the relative brightness of the RGB values, is mostly used for getting the contrast between a peice of text and its background color, which the former would hold significantly less space than a tile on a map. #475C5C and #515062 would fail for color contrast, but they have enough difference for two adjacent tiles on a map. Read more about DeltaE here.

Supported and unsupported expressions

Supports:

• steps
• stops
• interpolate
• interpolate with one layer of match
• case

Not supported:

• nested match
• in

...

Recommendations

1. Install extensions that would show colors specified in your document. For example, Color Highlight in VS Code.

2. If you want to experiement with what minimum DeltaE you want to use, or check the DeltaE, color contrast, and how two colors would look with different types of color blindness, go to https://leonardocolor.io/tools.html. You can use #475C5C and #515062 as an example. They have DeltaE of 5.56 for Deuteranopia, 7.95 for Protanopia, and 6.46 for Tritanopia.

3. To check how a group of color looks for people with different types of color-blindness, go to https://color.adobe.com/create/color-accessibility and select Color Blind Safe on the left column.

Installation, usage and flags

npm install color-unclasher

In terminal, provide the path to your style specification. If you would like to store the human readable analyzes result, enter a file path. Or else, result would be written to terminal.

color-unclasher styleSpecPath [analyzeResultFilePath]

To override default values or declare path to export or import data from, use the following flags:

Flag	Default Value	Explanation
--export-pairs-path	null	The path the non-compliant pairs would be exported to
--min-zoom	0	The minimum zoom level
--max-zoom	22	The maximum zoom level
--min-deltaE	5.5	The minimum DeltaE for a compliant pair
--pairs-to-ignore-path	null	The path to import non-compliant pairs to ignore
--get-suggest	false	Get suggested change of color for non-compliant pairs

Build instructions

After cloning the repository:

npm install
npm link
cd test
npm link color-unclasher

Then you can make changes to the code in src folder and test in test folder

Example workflow

1. Run analysis in terminal with the flag --export-pairs-path: Result in human readable format would be written to result.txt. output.json would be created for non-compliant pairs stored in a specific data structure.

color-unclasher styles.json result.txt --export-pairs-path output.json

Whats written to result.txt

Whats written to output.json

{
  "normal": {
    "fill": {
      "6": [[["airport"], ["grass"]]]
    },
    "line": {
      "17": [[["bus"], ["bike"]]]
    }
  },
  "deuteranopia": {
    "fill": {
      "6": [[["airport"], ["grass"]]]
    },
    "line": {
      "16": [[["bus"], ["bike"]]]
    }
  },
  "protanopia": {
    "fill": {
      "6": [[["airport"], ["grass"]]]
    },
    "line": {
      "16": [[["bus"], ["bike"]]]
    }
  },
  "tritanopia": {
    "fill": {
      "6": [[["airport"], ["grass"]]]
    },
    "line": {
      "11": [[["bus"], ["bike"]]]
    }
  }
}

2. Edit output.json to specify pairs to ignore in future analyses: Let's say I am not worried about "airport" and "grass" having similar colors, then I would leave pairs with "airport" and "grass" in output.json, and delete the rest. output.json should now look like:

{
  "normal": {
    "fill": {
      "6": [[["airport"], ["grass"]]]
    },
    "line": {}
  },
  "deuteranopia": {
    "fill": {
      "6": [[["airport"], ["grass"]]]
    },
    "line": {}
  },
  "protanopia": {
    "fill": {
      "6": [[["airport"], ["grass"]]]
    },
    "line": {}
  },
  "tritanopia": {
    "fill": {
      "6": [[["airport"], ["grass"]]]
    },
    "line": {}
  }
}

3. Analyze again and with flag --pairs-to-ignore-path followed by output.json:

color-unclasher style.json result.txt --pairs-to-ignore-path output.json

Then the result written to result.txt would no longer have the pairs configured to ignore

4. Get suggested change of color for non-compliant pairs with --get-suggest:

color-unclasher style.json result.txt --pairs-to-ignore-path output.json --get-suggest true

Color on the right hand side will be modified. Due to how suggested colors are generated, there is a bias for a increase in redness. Read the next section for more information.

Get adjusted colors

The automatic suggestions mentioned in example workflow uses two underlying functions, adjustRGB and adjustHSL. They both suggest colors by increasing or decreasing red, green, or blue, or hue, saturation, and lightness at a time. The returned object will contain suggestions that meet the min DeltaE threshold.

In automatic suggestions mentioned in example workflow, testing suggested colors with other existing colors will start with the first color in result, which would be color with red increase for RGB colors, and hue increase for HSL colors. Therefore, automatic suggestions have a bias for these two kind of colors.

These two functions are also available to be used individually. If you would like to view all suggested colors to pick a color on your own, in a JS file, use it as the following.

import ColorUnclasher from "color-unclasher";

const color1 = "#a4a95b"; // wouldn't be modified
const color2 = "#ff8375"; // have a deltaE of 2.81 with color1
const mode = 'deuteranopia'; // one of protanopia, deuteranopia, and trianopia
const minDeltaE = 7; // defaulted to 7

const newColors = ColorUnclasher.adjustRGB(color1, color2, mode, minDeltaE); // result in an object

color1 = #a4a95b color2 = #ff8375

Result:

red_increase: ----,

red_decrease: #da8375 ,

green_increase: #ffa875 ,

green_decrease: #ff5e75 ,

blue_increase: #ff8387 ,

blue_decrease: #ff833a