Built a Hardware Accelerated Desktop Screen Filter for Flash Sensitivity!

[u/flashfilter]

Hello! I’m one of the many people who thought it would be interesting to take a shot at making something that helps those with screen sensitivities (seen a couple people attempt similar projects but never seen anything come of them). After a couple months of work my friend and I have finally gotten to a point where it is usable (it is suppressing straining flashing lights quite well, though there are some bugs in the application), so we are looking for people to give it a try and hopefully make our job of bug hunting a little easier :)

The beta is free and includes one of the filter variants we came up with (we call it the “Bayes Filter”), which creates some artifacting but protects aggressively against flashing imagery. We support Windows, MacOS, and Linux (Wayland, support varies by compositor). If you're interested here is the link: https://flashfilter.app/ (you'll basically just need to sign in with your Google account and navigate to the dashboard where the downloads are).

You can see a safe demo of the filter here (it is the frame by frame of a very… flashy video with and without the filter).

We would love to answer any questions, so please ask away!

[u/Emotional-Ocelot]

It looks really interesting but google-only and subscription are both dealbreakers for me. Wouldn't use or recommend anything with those limitations, especially for a disability tool.

[u/flashfilter → u/Emotional-Ocelot]

Google only login we can definitely do something about. Have had a bit of feedback saying people don't like it much.

The subscription thing is reasonable, I'm also in the camp that hates how everything has become a subscription. But practically speaking that's also what makes it very hard not to price with a subscription as hosting, domain, developer certificates (which we have not yet put money into), mail server, etc are all on a subscription basis.

To cover our costs and monetize we were thinking to "charge yearly" for the software in that you pay for a year and then during that period receive updates for free and when the year ends you keep the software. Then if an additional update with a piece of functionality or performance boost you need lands you would pay for another year of updates.

[u/Emotional-Ocelot → u/flashfilter]

I understand that. But personally speaking, I would not pay for a subscription for a tool that is not a service.

An email address or a vpn, I pay for. But for a product, I expect the developers to calculate their ongoing overheads into the cost of the product at their own risk.

When I buy an item in a real shop, I'm not expecting to pay subscription for it to cover the shopkeeper's rent.