Is Information Always Informative? Perhaps to you, but is it to the Colour-Vision Deficient?

Every day we are surrounded by information which is supplied in many forms and we might be expected to make important decisions from that information. However, it may not be possible for all recipients of the information to make such necessary and informed decisions. In this paper we focus on the difficulties encountered by those who suffer from colour-vision deficiencies. We provide one mechanism of a potential solution to information derived from the frequently used pie-chart which are commonly used by businesses to visually represent (raw) data as information. We use the pie-chart creation tutorial provided by MSDN to highlight how the colour-vision deficient might have difficulties in interpreting information. Our potential solution is an image processing software tool called the HCBEenhanced. HCBEenhanced identifies the actual pie-chart within an image, which we call the Region of Concern (ROC) and any legend provided within the image. HCBEenhanced then inserts a halo around each segment of the pie-chart, which we call the halo-effect of segments. This new pie-chart is then provided as an output file to the user. We demonstrate that those suffering from colour-vision deficiencies, by use of HCBEenhanced, can have significant improvements in the ability to interpret the information that was intended from the original pie-chart.