Bug 515313

Summary: Feature Request: Allow simulating color blindness
Product: [Plasma] kwin Reporter: Jan Bidler <janbidler00>
Component: effects-variousAssignee: KWin default assignee <kwin-bugs-null>
Status: REPORTED ---    
Severity: wishlist    
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: 6.5.5   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Arch Linux   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Jan Bidler 2026-01-30 17:52:07 UTC
SUMMARY
(Not sure if this is the wrong product/component, please correct me if it's wrong)
As someone with normal vision, I sometimes want to design content that is accessible to people who are color blind. A live-toggleable effect within KDE would be nice for that. This is basically the inverse of the existing "Correction for Colorblindness" effect.

[DaltonLens](https://daltonlens.org/opensource-cvd-simulation/) has a review on different color blindness simulations along with their accuracies. They also include a C-Library (under the Unlicense which I'm not sure if it would cause issues) for implementing two algorithms.

Right now the workarounds are:
- Using the online simulator on DaltonLens/Gimp/whatever. This is very time consuming and slightly annoying to work with, and depending on which implementation also gets you inaccurate colors.
- Feeding a video stream of my desktop somehow into firefox/chrome, and using their dev-tool's feature of simulating color blindness. This is the most workable for me, however their color filters are (afaik) slightly inaccurate.
- Using KMag under X11 (it is broken under Wayland). I haven't actually tried this because I didn't want to use X11. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438912 for more on that.

Something to also consider, that the above mentioned link also quickly picks up on, is whether to include varying severities. For me personally, a full 100% severity would suffice, but some other people might benefit from being able to define one? 


SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Operating System: Arch Linux 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.22.0
Qt Version: 6.10.1
Kernel Version: 6.18.6-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Six-Core Processor
Memory: 16 GiB of RAM (15.6 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 570 Series
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Name: B450M DS3H