You can look at a flashing GIF on your computer screen and suffer from an epileptic seizure. There’s a name for this and about 2 million people worldwide suffer from this phenomenon. It’s called photosensitive epilepsy. Luckily, there’s a new Epilepsy blocker for sufferers that helps prevent epileptic seizures and it comes in the form of a Chrome extension.
If you’re suffering from photosensitive epilepsy, you are sure to run into trouble with three kinds of triggers. One, large flashes of light; two, frame transitions that include a shade of saturated red; three, geometrical patterns such as stripes.
After seeing people being affected by GIFs, Alex Sideris built this chrome extension as a part of a 24-hour challenge. This product is based on the works of leading researchers in photosensitive epilepsy—Dr. Harding from Cambridge and Professor Binnie from King’s College London.
This product is built on an algorithm based on the works of the above two researchers. It blocks any GIF that produces a considerably large flashing light. When you add this as an extension to your Google Chrome, it starts analyzing the websites you visit and blocks any suspicious GIFs.
As of now, this extension is being offered at an offer price of 10$ per month. It is still in the development phase and doesn’t work for 9Gag and Reddit yet. Also, among the triggers for photosensitive epilepsy were mentioned above, only the first trigger—large flashing lights can be analyzed and blocked using this chrome extension. The frame transitions with saturated red and geometrical patterns cannot be detected or analyzed for blocking yet.
The developer of this product has acknowledged these aspects on the product website and aims to improve this product by adding a few more functionalities in the coming future.
