Android 15 may soon be even more accessible for color blind users

Hundreds of millions of people have some form of color blindness, with many of them not even knowing it. People with color blindness can have trouble distinguishing between certain colors like red, green, and blue and often rely on accessibility options to compensate for their color vision deficiency. Android has long offered color correction modes as a part of its accessibility settings, but in Android 15, these modes may be joined by an intensity slider to further assist color blind users.

Under Settings > Accessibility > Color and motion, Android has a dedicated page for color correction settings. Here, color blind users can toggle one of Android’s several color correction modes, which each compensate for various degrees of color blindness.

Android offers two red-green correction modes that address issues with red and green perception; these are deuteranomaly correction (for people with difficulty distinguishing greens) and protanomaly correction (for people with difficulty distinguishing reds). Next, Android also offers tritanomaly correction to help people who have difficulty distinguishing blue hues. Finally, there’s also a toggle to enable grayscale mode, which helps people who can’t see any color.

These color correction modes tweak the color balance to help people with deuteranomaly, protanomaly, tritanomaly, or monochromacy better distinguish colors. Without these color correction modes, certain parts of apps, images, or other content will display colors that appear too similar for color-blind users.

Android helpfully provides a chart at the top of the color correction settings page that shows how colors are affected by each mode so users can preview the color balance changes before enabling them system-wide.

Android 15 could be expanding color correction settings by adding an intensity slider. This slider is not available yet in the latest Android 15 Beta 3.1 release, though, so we had to manually enable it. The slider will have three values, ranging from low, medium, to high, that tweak the intensity of the color balance changes for each color correction mode.

Here’s a gallery that shows how the intensity slider affects the color balance changes under the red-green deuteranomaly and blue-yellow tritanomaly color correction modes.

As you can see, the hue of each color is dramatically affected by the intensity slider. This slider, thus, could help compensate for varying degrees of deuteranomaly, protanomaly, or tritanomaly.

Every person has different needs, so adding more personalization to Android’s color correction settings could help color-blind users who felt that the existing options weren’t working well enough for them. I personally can’t speak for any of those users, but if you’re someone who lives with a form of color vision deficiency, let us know if this change in Android 15 will be helpful for you!