The Insider's guide to colour blindness

 

As a child, for some reason, I’d always fancied wearing glasses. I can’t remember why exactly now. But I think I’d filed "spectacles" somewhere under “gadget” and gadgets were cool. They were a brilliant prop, something you could hide behind, something to look over to demean your enemies, and I've heard they correct your vision too. Sadly, my excellent eyesight was having none of it. I always felt slightly robbed of an alter ego after passing an eye test, leaving the opticians empty-handed, armed only with my perfectly acceptable vision. Damn you! Eyes!

But a fateful optometrist visit was to change all that forever.

After predictably getting the all-clear, I retreated to the optician's book corner and absent-mindedly thumbed through the books on display. I picked up one of those dotty, psychedelic colour blind tests. After reading a few numbers out loud, my mum thought I might have a problem recognising colours. The optician confirmed this to be true. His words? "Mrs Russell, 

your son is colour blind".

And with that, I passed out...

This was it. I’d hit the jackpot. I was blind as a bat. (Admittedly a colour blind bat.) 



I know it's "only" colour blindness, but blindness is blindness and I wasn’t prepared to let anyone take that away from me. (To be fair, nobody had said or even implied they were intending to do so.)

As I left, I turned around and snapped this photo as a memento.

A bit of Science

Back then there was no such thing as glasses for colour blindness (more of Enchroma later). But I did learn a little about red/green colour blindness. Rods and cone photoreceptors in the back of the retina fail to receive the correct message and pass it on to the visual cortex. This leaves the owner of the eyes (me) with substandard colour perception.

"Deuteranomaly" is the name given to my personal predicament. It's the most common, with 6% of men and 1% of women being affected. It's inherited through the mother's X chromosome (cheers mum). The deficiency makes it harder to do some of those essential evolutionary basics handed down by our tree-dwelling tetrachromatic ancestors, like selecting ripe fruit, foraging for berries, reading traffic light sequences and buying flip-flops to match our swimming trunks.

    

I have a vague sense these images look different but I couldn't you tell why to be honest.

Other types of visual deficiencies include Monochromatism, where the cones fail to pick up any colour at all, so vision is limited to just black and white. Which is great if you love old movies. As long as it doesn't speed up the footage as well.

Scientifically accurate depiction of monochromatic vision. 

(Source: Scientific America).

 

Professions colour blind people can't do

Doctor

Soldier

Police Officer

Chef

Bomb disposal expert

Pilot

Fighter Pilot

Florist

Fortunately, the list fell into three distinct categories - things I couldn't do, things I didn't feel inclined to do and "Bollocks to that, it looks terrifying".

In fact, if spun correctly, this disability might even work in my favour.

My cunning ruse 

Growing up, I remember how adult men would often lament the end of their professional football careers. They would tell stories of how their dreams were abruptly shattered. They would point to a random body part, citing a career-ending ligament injury/dislocation or something of the ilk. 


“I was just about to have trials for..."(Insert a mid-table, not-too-impressive team of your choice and a vague tale that will be impossible to confirm and definitely unremembered by anyone still alive today).

 


“If it wasn’t for the old ligaments”, they would say shaking their head regretfully at their knee/shoulder/elbow/ankle... "Who knows what could have been..."

I would employ this underhanded excuse-making for myself with cunning dexterity.


“Have you ever considered being a doctor?” 


Do the glum face, a slow shake of the bonce, point sadly at the old eyeballs as if they were a wooden leg.

My floristry dreams were in tatters of course, and I was definitely going to have to give World War Three a raincheck. Grrr!


“Flat feet?”


Nope. Shakes head, points at eyes, “Bloody eyeballs.” Does sad face.
 Self-reflective nodding. 

Oddly, nobody seems to recollect how I wanted to be the world's first bomb disposal florist, (Perhaps I just didn’t want to show off, or perhaps they just weren't paying attention.) But I did want to be the world's first bomb disposal florist. A lot.

But, who in their right mind would entrust me, a blind person to defuse a bomb? And risk snipping the wrong wire, blowing up an out of control bus filled with screaming terrified kidnapped orphans and chrysanthemums? Not me. 



Alas, I was forced to look on helplessly as yet another career opportunity disappeared down Shit Creek, bouncing off every boulder as it went.


What a cunning ruse. Boom! Colour deficiency was my new best friend. Abject failures, all those vague "hopes and dreams" that I couldn't be arsed to follow up on, could now be easily explained away whilst retaining my honour and dignity.


This was to be my go-to "shrapnel wound". Goodbye, boring household chores - hello blue disability vehicle and free parking for life!

 (Because that's how 9 years olds think.)

(Apologies to any bomb disposal experts with PTSD. On reflection, that "boom" comment I made earlier, now appears to be a tad insensitive.)

The world was mine for the taking. And boy, was I going to take it...

Professions I wanted to do but now couldn't do, with possible career-ending consequences

The problem is, this bloody affliction also affects jobs I did want to do as well.
 

Graphic Design 

Interior design 

Exterior design 

Fashion design

Painting

Engineering

Like many children, I was always drawing and loved art. I built things, made things, sculpted things, coloured things in, cut things out. I experimented, I took things apart and failed to put things back together again. And I designed things - although "design" wasn't the word I would have used, it was something I was doing.

I had a lot of eggs in the design basket and this bastard disease was about to smash the lot.  My nonexistent career was derailing in front of my eyes and I was damned if this plucky nine-year-old me was just going to stand around and let that happen.

(I did nothing about it for 22 years.)

(Don't judge me.)

(I had stuff on.)

As an adult, I’m now in design and advertising and have developed a few nifty strategies to get me through. After years of keeping quiet, embarrassing myself, and worrying about "getting found out", I realised there were more effective ways of addressing the issue. It's all doable, you get by, you find tricks, hacks and strategies, so being colourblind makes little or no difference. 

People will ask "what colour's this then", pointing to... I don't know... a banana. This is not the way to test us. Colour out of context is where we struggle most.

Leaves are green and tomatoes are definitely red. So “guessing” which is which, is not going to challenge us. But take a pixel sample of each colour, blow it up and put it in front of me "cold' and I’m all the sea (aqua Pantone 319 to be precise).

Context is everything

We need to talk about "purple"

What is this mythical colour you people call “purple”? I'm still unsure whether or not it's a sick practical joke or occupies a legitimate position on the colour spectrum. When we leave the room do you guys slap each other on the back in hysterics? We only have your word for it that this colour exists. 

If you know a bit of colour theory it's possible to gain an intuitive grasp of what other people see but no amount of fiddling with a colour wheel, squinting or comparing, will help us get to the bottom of the purple problem. It's insurmountable. It's the devil's work.

Here's a useful cut-out-and-keep infographic to help illustrate where our heads are at: 

Skin tones

So, if you have a system, most design issues relating to colour are easily solvable. However, the only area I do not fully trust myself in is colour correction involving human skin tones. The nuances are especially noticeable when it comes to human faces. Seascapes, landscapes, spaceships, goldfish, dogs (you get the idea) to some degree are subjective - a bit too much green or red going on here and there and the viewer might at least think it’s an artistic decision. But if there's too much or too little of a certain colour in human faces, things can go glaringly wrong. If you ever catch me offering this service, zip-tie my hands behind my back and lock me in a cupboard.

Online help

For designers (vision deficient or not), Adobe has useful online accessibility tools that work and many of their apps have features that will do a lot of the legwork for you. Pantone also has a great online resource.

Ask people for a second opinion

We can always ask friends, family and colleagues. I've found most people are happy to help the chromatically challenged. It gives them an enormous sense of wellbeing and self-satisfaction (despite having to put in little or no effort).

Enchroma Glasses

There are no guide dogs for the colour blind, unfortunately, but there are Enchroma glasses. I have to say I’ve never tried them, but we have seen the emotionally charged responses in those YouTube videos. These poor souls are often filmed in front of a highly expectant group of family and friends who have coughed up between 200 and 400 USD for the things. There's an atmosphere something akin to a Billy Graham Revival Meeting. With tears of joy all around as the miracle unfolds.

The chances the recipient is going to take them off and say “well, that’s bullshit” are very slim indeed. I suspect these poor individuals are going through something very similar to the pressure we all feel opening disappointing Christmas presents or getting surprise tickets for "Stomp".(Stomp is an obnoxious sounding, percussion-based West End show, headed up by a troupe of binmen.)

I'm sure they work in many cases. But, no, the only true and fair test of Enchroma Glasses is to fly the wearer to Afghanistan with a pair of wire snippers and have them defuse an IED. 

We have superpowers

And there are some surprising side effects of our impairment too. Here comes the cavalry, literally. The army has been known to use colour blind spotters who are able to pick out the nuances and subtleties in colour contrast which normally sighted people find difficult to determine. The deuteranopic eye is more sensitive to contrast/light and shade. So picking out camouflaged objects and shapes in fog or in dark conditions is a skill we excel at. Basically, we have built-in night vision!

Some final thoughts

Back in my Xbox 360 days, I played the legendary Call of Duty - Modern Warfare console game. But, to be honest, when I started out I preferred racing games. That was until Activision, the game developers, updated the visual display with a colour blind friendly mini-map option. The mini-map is (unsurprisingly) a small map that's on-screen during the game to aid terrain navigation and locating of opponents. In the past, enemies were represented as tiny red dots on a green map, making them virtually indistinguishable from the background. Then Activision updated the red dots to orange. This subtle difference was a game-changer - literally. I didn't realise I'd been playing with a significant handicap for some time. The difference was phenomenal - it felt like an entirely new experience. I fell in love with the game and carried on buying the title for years to come.

So, there's a challenge out there for us designers to bring a little more to the table regarding accessibility. 

There are still many graphs, interfaces and experiences that are being ignored because they’re visually unintelligible. It’s irritating for us, we lose interest and move on. But it’s far worse for you because you’re losing business, customers, engagement, sales and opportunities.

So, don't be a lemon (Pantone 108C - I'm showing off now), think about your data viz carefully, accommodate the needs of colour blinders like myself. The slightest effort on your part will be noticed by us and it will add an essential string to your communications bow - your actions make a real-world difference. 

To see how well I cope (or not), my work is here. Would you suspect I have impaired colour vision? Maybe you're colour blind yourself or know someone who is and has had similar experiences, or if accessibility is an area of interest for you, it would be great to hear your thoughts and stories. 

After all, in the land of the colour blind, the one-eyed man is king.