I was actually starting another article that presents a solution (well, a research program) for qualia. [1] The idea is this:

The concept of qualia becomes mysterious when we have a situation in which sensory data (edit: actually, cognition of the sensory data) is incommensurable (not comparable) between beings. So the key question is, when would this situation arise?

If you have two identical robots with idential protocols, you have no qualia problem. They can directly exchange their experiences and leave no question about whether "my red" is "your red".

But here's the kicker: imagine if the robots don't use identical protocols. Imagine that they instead simply use themselves to collect and retain as much information about their experiences as physically possible. They optimize "amount I remember".

In that case, they will use every possible trick to make efficient use of what they have, no longer limited by the protocols. So they will eventually use "encoding schemes" for which there is no external rulebook; the encoding is implicitly "decompressed" by their overall functionality. They have not left a "paper trail" that someone else can use and make sense of (without significant reverse engineering effort).

In that case, you can no longer directly port one's experience over into the other's. To each other, the encoding looks like meaningless garbage. But if they're still alive, they can still achieve some level of commensurability. They can look at the same uniform surface and ask each other, "how does your photo-modality respond to this thingamajig?" [2] They can then synchronize internal experiences across each other and have a common conception of "red", even as it still may differ from what exactly the other robot is doing internally upon receiving red-data.

(And they can further constrain the environment to make sure they are talking about the same thing if e.g. one robot has tightly-coupled sensory cognition in which sensation of color varies with acoustics of the environment.)

This, I claim, is the status of humans with respect to each other: We have very similar general "body plans" but also use a no-holds-barred, standards-free method for creating (encoding) memories that puts up a severe -- but partially circumventable -- barrier to comparing internal experiences.

(Oh, and since you guys are probably still wondering: even I wouldn't fault you for failing to explain color a blind man. The best I would expect is that you can say, "Alright, you know how smelling is different from hearing? Well, seeing is as different from both of those as they are from each other.")

[1] Yes, I start a lot of articles but don't finish them ... have about three times as many in progress as I have posted.

[2] Remember: even though they have different internal experiences, they can still tell that a particular observation depends on a particular sensor by turning it on and off, and thus meaningfully talking about how their cognition relates to a particular sensor.

I 'get' the other two, but the red-silk analogy eludes me.