They say one in twelve US males (versus 1 in 200 women) are colourblind. Apart from traffic lights, I never thought much about other design implications. So this article interested me. Are you colourblind? Are there other examples? Any good stories or anecdotes?
Guess nobody can see this thread.
My grandson has ‘color confusion’ and the things he tells me are the same color is fascinating.
He had me buy him royal blue curtains and a teal comforter for his room. When they came I asked if he thought they went together and he said of course…because he thought the comforter was grey and that goes with everything.
Whether he guesses something as blue or purple is a 50/50 chance of getting it right. He can’t see the MARV logo in this article.
Neither can I. I bought an expensive pair of corrective glasses that allow me to see things in those tests but in the real 3D world they just give everything a rose colored tint. After 60 years, my brain just isn’t wired to appreciate “real colors”.
I had a hard time reading the MARV also. Anything blue/green mix will look just blue to me. This is a rather mild form of color blindness, Anomalous trichromacy. In my case it seems to be a matter of the frequencies my blue and green cones can distinguish favoring green heavily. I recently asked another ophthalmologist about this who couldn’t tell me if there was a genetic factor involved since my father may have had some form of colorblindness that I didn’t find out about until after his passing.
Your grandson’s color blindness seems more severe than mine, but aside from certain occupations it shouldn’t have much effect on his life. But if he wants to be a commercial pilot or medical doctor it could be a problem. As for design considerations, other people I’ve known with more severe forms of color blindness have preferred what some might call unusual color combinations. I knew a woman with what is called ‘blue-yellow’ colorblindness, a misleading name for the condition. She chose gray and yellow as the colors for her wedding decorations and the bridesmaid dresses since this combination appealed to her. The bridesmaids weren’t thrilled with that apparently, but I don’t know why they’d care so much for a dress they’d never wear again.
I also have a hard time with some shades of green and blue.
More accurately, I can easily tell them apart 90% of the time, but there’s a gray (ha !) area where my judgement, usually leaning towards green, is met with utter disbelief by everyone around me. As it happens, I’m particularly fond of these “suspicious colours”, as I like to call them. Light taupe is another one. Is it brown or gray ?
Interestingly, the distinction between blue and green has been the subject of more linguistics research than other hues, I think.
For me those little LED indicators that are red and green are a nightmare. I can’t really tell you what colour they are unless they are both lit to different colours and then I can say “the brighter one is probably green”
I seem to have a very slight red-green issue. I couldn’t do a red-green titration for the life of me in my university chem class. My prof was grading my chem lab results and noticed that I got red/green titrations wildly wrong, but most of the rest of the assignment was okay.
He set up a few of the experiments and went through them with me. At one point he said “what colour do you see right now?” I said “purplish grey”. He said he saw a clear green (or red, can’t remember now).
The thing is, when we kept going on the titration, there came a point where I could clearly see the change. It’s just that I had a wide margin where I couldn’t see the transition.
He gave me a pass on those assignments.
I just mention that my wife and I often disagree on blue v. green. Not pure blue or green but shades of turquoise in between. To me some of them look green and to her they look blue.
There are websites that will show you your website or photo as it appears to various types of colorblindness
I thought I was only mildly colourblind, but I recently took an online Ishihara Test and these are the results. They seem to suggest it is more severe than I realised. The ironic thing is I am an artist, and work as a Printer, so recognising colour really matters to me.
I had a disagreement with a friend about a particular color. I said it was blue, he said it was green. It was, in fact, this color:
That’s RGB(0,255,255) aka cyan. It has exactly the same amount of blue and green.
I have problems distinguishing between certain values of red and green, and sometimes, red and orange. Whenever this pops up in a demo or class, and I ask for clarification, there’s always some idiot who pipes up, “Can’t tell red from green? Why do they let you drive?!”
FWIW I’m an electrical engineer, and never had a problem identifying the color-coded values of resistors. That system appears to have been designed to avoid comparisons which involve common forms of colorblindness. As, apparently, are many such systems. It’s no coincidence that red, the color that has the smallest number of people who can’t detect it, has been a symbol of distress for millenia.
About the only thing I currently have a problem with are the user interfaces on DVDs. There will be several choices onscreen, one of which is apparently underlined. I can’t tell which one it is until I press ‘select’, at which point the underline becomes visible. Arghhhh!
I would call it green. I am certain my wife would call it blue.