Ask the guy who’s severely color-blind.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Inspired by the discussion on this thread on color perception, and at the request of Queen Tonya, I have decided to host my own “Ask the … Guy” thread.

I’m color blind. So much so that I don’t even understand it. There are retinal cone cells in our eyes that are responsible for perceiving colors. There are 3 different cones, each one responsible for a wavelength (long, medium & short.) Apparently, my color deficiency (you can call it “blindness—I won’t get offended) affects all three of the possible cones that can be affected. From what I understand, the “S” cone deficiency is quite rare…to have all three affected in the same person is rarer still. Does any of this make sense? Well, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me either. The bottom line is I don’t have a total lack of perception in any one of these cones, but I have an extreme issue with all three. In English, I see colors, but I don’t see colors the way ‘normal’ people do. The thread that started this discussion asked the question “Are colors the same for everyone?” I believe the answer covered was that we all have a ‘standard’ way to perceive colors.

Or I should say all of you have a standard way. Not me.

So go ahead and ask me anything.

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How do you dress? Is it all neutral colors so nothing will clash? Does someone help you buy them? I ask because my fiancee is a little color blind and doesn’t always match. He does love plad tho, I guess because he likes patterns.

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A couple questions regarding the color wheel on this page:

  1. Do you see anything other than a circle that’s dark in the middle and lighter as you move away from the center?

  2. As you run your mouse over it, how does the changing area below look?

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Is there any system in schools and universities for helping colorblind students complete assignments that require color perceptions, such as science experiments that depend on observations of colored objects.

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How does your colour-blindness affect your everyday life? Can you distinguish between red and green traffic lights, for example?

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Little Bird, Well…I tend to either be a jeans & a Tee shirt kind of guy, or a Hawaiian shirt guy, so dressing isn’t a daily problem. Jeans match everything & my ugly shirts match nothing. I do tend to stick to colors that are easy for me. Earth tones & such. Dressing up nicely is different. The color of kahki pants is a color I despise (loud & abrasive), but I’m told by everyone that it’s a nice, normal look. I’m a horror-show trying to match ties with shirts. I won’t shop for clothes alone. I’m lucky enough to have a great girlfriend who looks out for me and won’t let me go out looking too much like a freak.

ultrafilter That color wheel looks like it’s dark in the middle, gradually getting blue on the bottom half & yellow on the top half. By looking at the changing area, I can see that there must be more than blue & yellow in there, but out of context it’s difficult to tell what I’m looking at. Oddly enough, I’m a photographer by trade & I’ve done custom color enlarging in my day & I’ve been known to use photoshop as well. I kind of trained myself to apply colors in context when correcting a photograph. If the photo is abstract though, I’m screwed.

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Interesting. How does it look as you move along the vertical middle from left to right?

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ITR Champion, I wasn’t aware of anything to help compensate while I was in school (It’s been almost 10 years since college) other than asking for some help. I had lab partners in science classes that would bear the burden of color identification. I do know that some web developers have taken steps to ensure that their site looks as intended, even to the color deficient. I don’t think those efforts would affect me much. I’m told I’ll never fly a plane or be part of a bomb squad. Que sera sera, eh?

EmeraldGrue, My everyday life isn’t affected much, really. The red light on a traffic signal is usually the “dark” light on top & the green is the “bright” one on the bottom. I did have a problem in my area when the powers that be installed some anti-glare horizontal signals. I had a real problem with them, but they didn’t last (I guess they didn’t reduce glare like they were supposed to) very long. I seriously avoided those intersections when they were there, though. Other than that, I have a hard time seeing when meat is done cooking (I’m paranoid about it & as a result tend to overcook things), I don’t notice sunburn until it really hurts (Also paranoid-sunscreen junkie.) I go through a normal day without even thinking about it until it’s brought up, really. Say I’m in a store & I’m asking for help. The person I’m talking to says “You have to ask Ted…He’s the guy over there with the brown shirt.” I look & see a few people who could be Ted, because it occurs to me that anyone in that group over there could be wearing a brown shirt & I **Just. Don’t. Know. **

[Angst-Ridden Flashback]Relives painful memory about the girl in the purple blouse who liked him, but he talked to the girl in blue who didn’t…[/ARF]

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The left side is lighter…there’s white there. After staring at the right side (I’m seeing spots now) i can make out a color between blue & yellow…it’s either red or brown…but it doesn’t extent to the edge of the circle.

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I was wondering about school stuff as well, the elementary years particularly.

From pre-school until literacy, so much is color-coded, everything from ‘scissors in the blue bin and glue-sticks in the green one’ to assignments like ‘draw a line to the big red square.’ I knew one student who was mistakenly labeled learning-disabled for his poor school performance until someone finally figured out he was color-blind, and he was only dealing with one type of deficiency. However did you cope with school as a kid?

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Hi Queen Tonya!

I have an early memory in kindergarten where every one in the class had to make a head-shape from white construction paper & try to make a self-portrait using crayons. My teacher noticed I was coloring my face green. That incident led to my first color-blindness test. Other than that, there wasn’t much that became a problem. May of the things you described were easy to figure out without using the color-code. Using your “big red square” example…How many big squares am I dealing with? Scissors in the blue box? I just found the box with scissors in it. I guess I learned some problem-solving skills at an early age.

Art projects were always tough, but I was usually able to get some help if I needed it.

For the record, every single kid in that kindergarten class made fun of me for coloring my face green.

Each one of them is on my list.

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Hi Andy! Thanks for the thread. :slight_smile:

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Ever read Oliver Sacks’s book, “The Island of the Colorblind”? It’s about an isolated pacific island where a large portion of the population has inherited colorblindness. But they also have a great deal of other visual problems, due to their cones being mostly inactive. Do you experience other visual problems?

I have “color-blindness” in that I don’t see the same numbers and letters in those dot pictures that everyone else does, but I see colors perfectly as far as I can tell. I mean, what everyone else calls red I call red, I can tell the difference between green and brown, etc. I suppose some colors don’t contrast as much for me as for everyone else. If it wasn’t for the dot tests I would never have diagnosed myself with “color-blindness”.

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This is a cool thread. Ok, I teach art history classes to college kids. If you were back in college in my class and on the first day when I asked for kids to bring me any documentation of learning disabilities so I could make arrangements, if I also asked any color-blind students to let me know of it, too (considering the particular nature of the material, just so I’d be aware if any difficulties came up related to it), would you feel relieved or annoyed? Would it seem considerate and helpful, or condescending?
Also, can you see red laser pointers? If you can’t, what would a good alternative be in a lecture hall? (the good old fashioned STICK?)

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“Island of the Colorblind” is a pretty cool book, although it’s about complete colorblindness, so Andy is not exactly the same. What I thought was the most interesting was that the completely colorblind people could see many more shades, and that helped them fish in shallow water. One woman knit a sweater in something like 16 similar but different shades, which she could see perfectly, but normally sighted people had a hard time distinguishing the pattern–to them it looked like just a couple different shades.

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I was wondering about that, because I have an interesting quilter’s tool: it’s a sheet of clear red plastic, and if you want to know if colors will go together, you place the plastic over the two pieces of fabric together. This eliminates the eye’s tendency to send a “blue goes with blue” message and pulls out the undertones in the fabrics (i.e. a cool blue with a warm blue, which rarely works well.)

I’m pretty sure I didn’t explain that well, but there are much better quilters than I around here who know what I’m talking about.

To those of you who know about color-blindness: is it possible to be only slightly colorblind? My husband has a problem with brown and plum shades - he’s says they’re indistinguishable from one another. He’s also a little iffy on violets and blues, but he seems to see most other colors pretty well. I’ve heard of red-green colorblindness - is it possible that he has “just red” colorblindness?

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If you tune into the Red Green Show, do you see anything?

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No.

I really really wish they’d stop telling people that being colorblind disqualifies them from being a pilot.

From the sound of it, they won’t let you fly at night because of the color signal lights used, but if you want you could (assuming no other major impairments affecting safety) get a pilot’s license and fly during the daytime.

(Note: this applies in the US - other countries have other rules about colorblind pilots, but since Andy give his location as Long Island, NY I’d say US regs probably apply in his case0

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Yes, it’s possible to be “just a little colorblind” as you put it.

In my case, my green-detectors don’t work as well as most peoples. It seldom causes problems. Actually, it never caused a problem until I applied for a pilot’s license, but since in my case the problem is so minor all I had to do is take one extra vision test to get color-related restrictions removed from my license.

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Lemur866, I haven’t read that book, but I will. It sounds pretty interesting. As for your sight, I’d say you are “slightly” color deficient (blind.) If those circle-tests are showing you different numbers than anyone else, than your perceptions are a little off. It sounds like you have (unconsciously?) compensated for it. I’ve had to do this in a variety of ways over the years. For instance, I know the sweatshirt I’m wearing is green (It’s a New York Jets Sweatshirt) so I can associate my sweatshirt with green. If something looks like my sweatshirt, I can (sometimes) guess that it’s green. If your abilities aren’t as impaired as mine, it’s possible you’ve done this kind of thing all of your life & never got one wrong…and also never thought about it.

capybara, Why thank you. I’m enjoying it too. If I were in your class, I would consider that considerate. I wrote a stand-up comedy routine about being color blind & one of the main points is how there is zero sensitivity to it as a disability. In this day of everything being PC, the color blind gets no respect. You wouldn’t go up to a person who’s blind and say “How many fingers am I holding up?” When people find out about my color blindness, the first question I get is “What color is this?” I’m used to it, and I kind of have fun with it. Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t be annoyed at all, but I can’t speak for the student that also yells at bad drivers or considers waiting on line at the bank to be inexcusable. I’ve never had a problem with laser pointers, as their light is usually pretty intense. I have trouble with certain highlighters though. A co-worker highlighted a route on a map for me once & the highlighting was invisible to me. It was a weird pink highlighter, and the map’s paper wasn’t straight white. The combination was just something I couldn’t see at all. That is a very rare thing to happen though.

Mirror Image egamI rorriM, I was once watching a sunset with a friend that I thought was magnificent, with millions of different illuminations & tons of rich, deep color. We used to watch sunsets from this spot somewhat often, and she was surprised that I was so excited over such a ‘bland’ sunset. Maybe that’s similar to what was happening in the book. Was I seeing little things that she couldn’t? Maybe.

LifeOnWry, I’m no quilter, but I know what you’re talking about. As for your husband, it’s certainly possible to be ‘a little’ color blind. Red-green are the preceptor cones affected, but it doesn’t mean that he has to confuse red & green. Have him look at the Ishihara circle tests I linked and see what he comes up with. Of course, when you’re talking about violets, plums & other subtle colors, he could just be a somewhat typical guy and not pay a lot of attention to them. I’ve watched my sister pick out nail polish & I would swear that she was looking at 10 different bottles of the same exact color. When I mentioned this to her fiancé, who isn’t color blind, he thought the same thing.

AskNott, Not a thing. I can’t fully appreciate Yellow Submarine either. I understand that the Blue Meanies are mean, but the rest is lost on me.

Broomstick, A few things are possible with regard to my doctor.

  1. He was just wrong.
  2. He was right when he said it & things have changed since.
  3. I, specifically am too messed up to be a pilot.

I never had any interest in being a pilot, so I never followed up on what I was told. He also said it was a bad idea for me to be a photographer, but here I am. So the hell with doctors telling the color deficient what they can’t do! I’ll do anything I want!

Except that bomb-squad thing…I’ll leave that to other more qualified people.