Name This Color for Color Blind - Free software

Free software for Windows to assist color blind people, it gives the color name for the color under the mouse pointer in any region of the screen, and it's fully customizable.

Motivation

In the world population 8% of men and 0.5% of women are color blind. This is roughly 300 million men and 19 million women. There should exist a free program to assist them.

Features

• The program gives the color name that is under the mouse pointer in any region of the screen, even when it is minimized and without the focus on the application.
• The color dictionaries are fully customizable; you can add your own, change the existing ones or translate to any language. The color dictionary is in a XML file that is checked for correct structure automatically by a DTD file.
• It shows the following info related to the color: Name, RGB values (Red, Green and Blue), HEX values (RGB in Hexadecimal).
• It shows a rectangle with the color to ease the color identification and assessment.
• It shows a zoom windows with a cross arrow to facilitate the target of a color in small regions.
• You can choose between several color dictionaries or use them all at the same time. More color dictionaries can be added by the user.
• You can copy the current color to the clipboard with a customizable Hot Key. And you can choose to paste the color Name, the RGB HEX color value or the RGB color value.
• It has grey scale automatic detection and gives the percentage of grey in a color. This feature can be enabled or disabled.
• It shows the exact color name if the color appears without brackets or the most approximate color when it appears inside brackets. The color similarity identification or difference against the color dictionary uses the method L*a*b that corrects the RGB distance to the human perception difference.
• You can choose to add or remove the color name tag at the mouse pointer.
• You don't need a installer to install this program, you simply copy 4 files into a directory and run directly the exe file.
• The manual is accessible from the About button on the program.

Author

João Nuno Carvalho

License

This program is freeware, see the license in the About dialog in the program.

Execution on Windows 10

When running for the 1st time, Windows 10 shows a message saying this program isn't signed and because of that it could be bad to your computer. This program is a normal program and to run it you have to choose 'more info' and 'run anyway'. In the properties of the .exe file you can choose to ignore this warning that the program isn't signed. To sign a program so that this warning doesn't appear, a programmer must buy a digital certificate every year from a certification company and this type of certificates are expensive, that's the reason why this program isn't digitally signed yet.