People who have color vision deficiency often struggle with reading maps and charts that use certain colors to label various elements.

Color Assistant is a handy desktop application can come to your assistance. It causes a selected color to flash intermittently anywhere on the screen, making it much easier to distinguish. The app runs only in the system tray and can be activated with a simple hotkey.

The application is minimized to the system tray upon launch, and you can access it by clicking the tray icon or using the configured key combination. A small UI is displayed in the system tray area when you start picking colors, and you can click the Exit button or press ESC to close it.

Color Assistant works regardless of the type of content that is displayed on the screen, including web pages, images or documents. The color you select will be flashed continually as long as the left mouse button is pressed.

The app will never get in your way while you are working, and you can change the default global shortcut to ensure you can access it easily at any time; however, this requires you to edit the configuration file, but you can open it easily from the system tray menu.

If two colors on the screen are quite similar, the application may have a hard time telling them apart. Thankfully, though, you can choose between three detection modes to ensure you get the most accurate results.

On the whole, Color Assistant is a nifty piece of software that can be very helpful for those affected by color blindness. It requires no installation, making it simple to deploy, and it runs quietly in the background while still being easily accessible.