I am working on something that is sensitive to how well the potential users can perceive colors, and it leads me to wonder if there is a more acceptable / less fraught term for Color Blindness. I did a quick on-line search and found Color Vision Deficiency suggested. While “deficiency” is probably more accurate than “blindness”, it still feels like a possibly objectionable word.
Is there a better term available?
Is it kind of like uhmm ‘neurodiversity of viewing colors?’ The consultant at my job might put it like that.
Red-green color blindness runs in my family. The people who have it say they are color blind.
I have it; I’m color-blind.
The best I can offer is a friend of mine who said he could not “discern” colors. Of course in casual conversation he simply said he was “color blind.”
Thanks all, I won’t be having to use a term in any public facing way for this project, but wondered if there was a more up-to-date term. I do have a few acquaintances who have the most common red/green form, all males, and they also describe it as color blindness. However they are also about my age, so not necessarily keeping up with more inclusive descriptions.
Achromatopsia = total color blindness
Yes, if your friend is Greek (or wants to sound more befitting a disciple of Asclepius) he will say he has achromatopsia.
What context would you be using the term in?
There are, for example, tools for ensuring that public communications are “ADA compliant” for contrast, font size and type, and (maybe?) color vision.
Something like that lets you refer to it functionally rather than referring to a group of differently abled people.
Casual: color blind
Scientific: color vision deficient
You could also use the specific type of deficiency but most people don’t really know what they have. Red-green covers at least 4 separate things, qualitatively they’re not substantially different. Or Daltonism.
I suppose you have to know your audience here, but for a general audience too much talk of e.g. typhlosis and amaurosis and that sort of thing might smack of the 19th century when physicians wrote passages or entire books in Latin and Greek so hoi polloi would not be able to comprehend it. At some point we need to speak English and mention (color) blindness. [I do know someone with this red/green condition, and he mentioned he was color-blind.]
A known standard medical term for generic crappy vision is “low vision”. I believe that mostly refers to defects in focusing / acuity, but I’m not an expert.
For your situation I could see using “low color vision” as a term that’s not as strong / potentially offensive. To be clear, this specific term is something I’m inventing right now, not anything with any common usage behind it that I know of.
I have red-green colour blindness. I just say that I’m colour blind.
My doctor once told me, “If you really want to get technical, you can tell people you suffer from dichromatism.” But I have found that “colour blindess” works well enough.
There are technical scientific names for each of the version of colorblindness (see Types of Color Blindness | National Eye Institute), but I don’t think there is such a scientific name for the phenomenon as a whole, or it would probably be at that link.
I am color blind, simple.
I tell people I have anomalous trichromacy. I don’t know why they’re always asking if it’s contagious.
Here is an article in the Verge I came across yesterday about what the world looks like for a colour blind person. It mentions several types of colour blindness, including Achromatopsia, or total colorblindness and deuteranopia, the most common type of green-red colour blindness. I found the article interesting.
The author, colour blind himself, uses the term colour blindness as the general concept and does not seem to worry about it.
I’m red-green ‘color blind’. I have no problem with the term other than it doesn’t really describe the condition. I can see red and green, just not as much/well/easily/fully as someone with ‘normal’ color vision. I suspect, given that human traits usually run on a bell curve-like distribution, a few people are super excellent at discerning between different hues of green and red, etc. We might have a term for them one day.
From the responses so far, it looks like color blindness is not regarded as a pejorative term, but I will try to use color vision deficiency myself.
@eschrodinger have you seen the Adobe Color checker tool, currently free online at Color Blind Safe - and note what they call it…
FYI, the link doesn’t work on mobile devices, only desktops.