Hue Hunt

Accessibility advocacy often lives in the abstract. You can cite WCAG contrast ratios, walk a team through the guidelines, and recite the statistics, and still watch eyes glaze over. Words, however precise, rarely close the empathy gap the way direct experience does.

That lesson became personal when, as part of my own work on ADA compliance, I blindfolded myself and attempted to navigate a website using only a screen reader. Within minutes, frustration set in: broken focus order, unlabeled buttons, images with no alt text. The experience reframed every checklist item I had ever reviewed. The rules suddenly had weight because I had felt the problem firsthand.

Hue Hunt was built from the same philosophy, applied to color accessibility.

On the surface, Hue Hunt is a simple browser game. A grid of color tiles appears, and one tile is ever so slightly different from the rest: a subtly lighter shade, a fractionally shifted hue. Your job is to find it, as fast as you can. Each correct pick advances you to the next level, where the grid grows and the difference between tiles shrinks. Miss the tile and time is penalized. Run out of time and the game ends.

Underneath that simple mechanic is something more intentional: the game is silently tracking which color ranges trip you up. Every round is logged against a color bucket (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Purple), capturing how long you took to find the odd tile, how many wrong tiles you tapped first, and how often a particular color range appeared at all.

When time runs out, the game surfaces a color breakdown, a personal performance report showing where you were fastest, where you were slowest, and where you mis-tapped the most. For many players this is the first time they have seen their own color perception mapped out numerically.

For me, the data is fairly consistent: I take significantly longer distinguishing subtle differences between green shades, and I mis-tap more in red ranges. That means green-on-green text, red error messages on a red background, or low-contrast UI elements in those ranges are genuinely harder for me to process, not because I am inattentive, but because of how my visual system is wired.

That is the point. The game does not lecture about color blindness. It demonstrates it, through the player's own results. The post-game data becomes a mirror: "This is what it feels like to struggle with a color combination." is a far more persuasive argument than any compliance document.

A game about color perception should not exclude players with color vision deficiencies. Hue Hunt includes a Pattern Assist mode that adds a subtle diagonal texture to tiles, allowing the odd tile to be identified by pattern rather than color alone. The feature is togglable mid-game and persists across sessions, reflecting the same design principle the game advocates: accessibility options should be first-class, not afterthoughts.

When Hue Hunt launched, it drove a meaningful spike in traffic to youmightfindit.com. The engagement was not surprising in hindsight, albeit a bit skewed. Most of the stuff on my website is not interactive, so it makes sense that a game tested better than documentation. People enjoy games, and a game that also tells you something true about yourself has a natural shareability to it. Players would finish a round, see their color breakdown, and want to compare results with friends.

That being said, the hope was always that the game would:

1)    Inform people about their own accessibility needs.

2)    Remind people that the colors designers and developers choose are not neutral decisions. They determine who can read a page clearly, who stumbles, and who is quietly left out.

As with all projects of this nature, I hope it made a positive difference.