Friday, December 27, 2019
i2C Inc. launched a digital banking website and mobile app Dec. 23, 2019, designed to provide color blind customers with access to web and mobile banking services. The company’s color-enhanced cardholder website and mobile banking app are the newest additions to its global software-as-a-service platform that facilitates a range of digital banking and payments solutions and capabilities.
Approximately one in 12 men and one in 200 women around the world can see clearly but are unable to identify red, green or blue colors, according to “Smartphone Based Image Color Correction for Color Blindness,” a 2018 study published in the International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies. Lamiaa Elrefaei, author of the study, noted that in rare cases, people are unable to see any color at all.
Amir Wain, founder and CEO of i2c, pointed out that one in every 76 U.S. citizens has a form of color blindness, which equates to 1.30 percent of the overall population. Until now, little effort has been expended to provide digital-banking accessibility options to color blind individuals, he stated. “i2c has invested time and resources into developing state-of-the-art color-enhanced digital banking solutions,” he said. “This is not only a good thing for improving our platform, but it’s the right thing to do to help make life easier for consumers around the world.”
Elrefaei cited three common forms of color blindness in his report: monochromacy, dichromacy and anomalous trichromacy, which are based on the presence or absence of rod and cone receptors in the eye that facilitate color sensitivity. “For human vision, there are two types of photoreceptors: rods and cones,” he wrote. “Rods are sensitive to light while cones are sensitive to colors.” The absence of one or more rods or cones can cause “a reduction in the sensitivity to a particular color,” he added.
Technology and color correction algorithms can help people with color blindness see images and distinguish between different colors, Elrefaei noted. Approaches include the LMS Daltonization algorithm, Color-blind Filter Service algorithm, LAB color corrector algorithm and shifting color algorithm. Smartphone-based implementation of these methods enables users to choose algorithms accordingly.
Additionally, a variety of simulator models can be used diagnose specific cases of color blindness. “People use color-blind simulators to check their artwork, pictures, documents and web pages for color blind visibility,” Elrefaci wrote. “Some simulators are offered as an offline software program, an online web page or a mobile application.”
i2c representatives stated that color blindness can be caused by trauma, such as UV damage or chronic illness, or inherited; the most common conditions are the inability to distinguish between red and green or blue and yellow. The i2c mobile app and cardholder website provides digital-banking accessibility options to people with a range of color blind conditions, varying from slight issues to complete color blindness, they added. 
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