30 Years of Solving theWrong Problem: How Recolouring Tool Design Fails those with Colour Vision Deficiency

By far the most available assistive tool to assist people with Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD) is recolouring. However, despite over three decades of research designing and developing recolouring tools, no work yet has looked to understand how these tools are actually used or perceived by people with CVD. To address this, we first analyzed posts and comments from the r/colorblind subreddit in order to get an unconstrained understanding of the perspectives people with CVD have on recolouring tools. We then conducted an observation study with follow-on interview to further understand how people with CVD use and perceive these tools in a more controlled setting. Our findings suggest that recolouring tools are rarely used how their designers intended and that a better future solution is to design with true inclusivity by solving the actual problems people with CVD have, rather than attempting to 'fix' CVD.