[TOPIC] Colorblindness

I found this:

http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/aboutcb.html

I don't know a lot, but have a funny story about my brother, who was colorblind.

We were seniors in high school (I'd skipped a grade and he flunked one). He went shopping for school clothes and came home really excited about the beautiful blue shirt he'd found on sale. He had a limited budget, so was really pleased with the bargain--until I told him the shirt was lavender.

From the limited knowledge that I know - most green/reg color blind guys can see the colors, but theyre more vivid, so its like a neon green and like a bright pinkish red.

I kinda have a funny story about my colorblind friend too.

We were driving through this tiny town in washington - close to idaho - and there were railroad tracks on the edge of town. Since it was such a small, older town, there were none of the new arms that come down in front of the road when a train is coming. When we were reaching the edge of town, I noticed the rail road crossing lights were flashing, but my guy friend made no move to speed up or slow down. He just drove right on over the tracks, as I pointed out the oncoming train. Apparently he hadnt noticed the flashing "red" lights.

~Kami

My friend is red/green colorblind. I've had some of the, "LIGHT! RED!" moments with him as well. It's a little scary at times. The funny thing is that he can't tell the difference between different apples. He can't tell you what kind of apple it is by just looking at it.

Nano 2005: Legend of Jael (Won)
Nano 2006: Diary in the Attic (Won)
Nano 2007: Reel Smuggling (Won)
Nano 2008: Those We Lost (A challenge, but it will work--I've got a winning pattern happening)

An artist friend of mine makes these little pieces of creature art, and occasionally she lets her colorblind husband color them.

They always come out these crazy intense greens and reds, the kind that really just make your eyes want to bleed, and he didn't see anything wrong with it. And that was after his wife would do a little gentle 'encouraging' of him to tone things down a bit or lean toward certain, less blinding, colors.

I think she said that, to him, the colors seemed more natural or neutral.

For the creatures that needed a human-like skintone, he was completely hopeless and had her pick for him.

Your character will come to know if a light is green or red by the position of the illuminated light instead of the color. I have a red/green/brown colorblind friend. Watching him dress himself is usually pretty funny, actually.

I once complimented him on a new shirt and he asked me what color it was.

Parents often first realise their child is colourblind when he starts drawing and colouring. "My Trip to the Zoo" turns up with blue monkeys and so on.

My husband Colin had a friend who was COMPLETELY colourblind -- total black-and-white. This guy was a natural at playing pool, and he really wanted to learn how to play snooker because he'd heard it was a more strategic and tactical game. Colin taught him how to play, but at every shot the poor man would have to point at the various balls and ask what colour each one was. (Snooker balls are red, brown, green, yellow, blue, pink, and black, as well as the white cue ball. Each colour is a different point value, and the reds are played differently from the other colours.) He had to give up in the end; he was brilliant at potting balls, but he couldn't see the layout as a whole and therefore couldn't develop strategies.

"Adventure's laid its claim on you,
It's all you want to do."
-- REM, Electron Blue

My Father is colour blind. I have blue/grey eyes, and was wearing bright red contact lenses to get used to them before halloween. While no-one else was making eye contact he was. I asked him what difference there was, and all he could see was that it was a flat colour on the top of my eye, but otherwise no difference.

He nearly crashed into the back of a bus once. He couldn't see that the red brake lights were on, he leaves a good stopping distance between himself and any other driver. His optician advised him to stop at traffic lights, unless he's following a car through, or he can see if the top or bottom light is illuminated.

Which reminds me, if I'm having a boy there's a 50/50 chance of them being red/green colour blind, as it's carried on the X chromosone, I assume my father gave me an X, otherwise I wouldn't be in a position to be pregnant right now ;), So it depends on which of my Xs I'm passing on. A daughter has a 50/50 chance of being a carrier of a recessive gene from me, but as Hubby isn't colour blind, his X chromosone would be dominant and allow a daughter to see colours normally.

My husband is red/green colorblind. He has the most trouble with paler shades of red and green, like spring green and any pinks, which he sees as shades of gray. He can generally guess which shade of gray is pink and which is green, too. He also has trouble with mauve, lavender, those sorts of shades.

Brightness and intensity make a difference, too -- it's easier for him to see very bright reds and greens. Natural shades, such as the green of leaves and the reds roses, are easier for him to distinguish.

He sees stoplights as differences in brightness -- if the ball on top is brighter, it's a red light.

He was first diagnosed at a routine school eye exam when he looked at the color test. His parents always thought he was lying when he said he couldn't tell if something was red or green! On one of our first dates, he wore a red shirt with a green jacket. I thought that he was either colorblind or really liked Christmas.

Of course I have a blog!

I'm partially colorblind in a non-standard way. What's strange is that both my parents have normal color vision and I'm a girl. My brother is colorblind, so he must have gotten it from my grandfather.

I can all of the colors, what I can't do is tell shades of colors, especially the warmer ones. Orangy reds, most oranges, and the orangy yellows all appear brown to me. Olive green tends to look brown to me, unless it is someone's skin tone (I'm very near sighted by the way. When I remove my glasses and look at someone with olive toned skin, they look much greener to me than with my glasses on.)

I once thought I painted my bathroom light green with light orange trim. My friends and family all ended up telling me that it was bright, bright green and the orange was a cross between neon orange/neon pink. It looked cheerful and fine to me. My friends generally couldn't look at it very long and when I sold my house, the people viewing the house all left very interesting notes with my realtor.

My way of coping is ask people if the shades go together (ie, so I don't a blanket with lots of pastels and then all of a sudden have a bright green or red patch that looks like an accident), especially when I'm trying to knit, dye or paint something. I no longer do magazine art layout (that's actually where most of my issues got noticed, we had a magazine with a sunset over Chicago on it, and I couldn't figure out why we had all these brown clouds), and when I was programming GUIs, I had my lead sit down and develop a standard color palette for me.

I look best in bluish-reds (look horrible in orangy-reds), purple and turquoise and oddly, I can pick the correct shades of these all the time.

My dad has typical red-green colorblindness, and his solution to ensuring his clothing always matches is to only wear shades of khaki, brown, dark green, and blue. Otherwise, he has my mother pick everything out for him, especially when he's travelling. The night before he leaves, she'll make sure to show him which shirts go with which pants, etc.

Last year, I partnered a lot in lab classes with a colourblind guy. Man oh man. I never realised how many experiments are dependent on visualising colour changes until I worked with him. We spent many, many hours with him absently swirling a mixture of chemicals and pH indicators round and round a beaker while asking me, who was trying to work on the next part, "Is it done yet? Is it done yet? Is it done yet?..."

But I digress. Not only is he red-green colourblind, but like briezee, he can't distinguish very well between shades of the same colour. For instance, in one experiment analysis we had to put our blue samples in order, from faintest to most intense (they were all the same colour, just different concentrations). He knew they were all blue, but had no idea how strong the colour was. The idea of one sample being a stronger colour than the one next to it was alien to him; blue was just BLUE, end of.

As a side note, an interesting character quirk is that, since I don't know very much about colourblindness, I never worked out how much of my partner's difficulties in lab was due to an actual problem distinguishing colour changes and how much conveniently resulted in me doing most of the work...! Something for your character to exploit, perhaps. ;)

I'm colourblind myself. I've never been exactly sure what kinds -- I've had coworkers ask what colours I can't see, then do a mental back-pedal. :) I pretty much cannot tell the colour of cars, and was once given binders for school and got all the colours for them wrong. As tags at work are colour-coded, this can be interesting. Pink is easy. the yellow/green/orange tags, on the other had, are pretty much guesswork some days. Shades of colours are pretty much non-extant in many cases.

One funny story: A friend was doing digital art, and sent me a pic of a woman he'd drawn. I looked it over, then asked why she was naked. It turned out she was wearing a green coat, but to me it was the same colour as the flesh. we hada good laugh about it at least.

Member of SFFmuse

My husband is VERY colorblind- all he sees are shades of grey. He can't see red/green at all, and only the brightest colors stand out for him.

We were driving through Texas once, late at night, and we came to this little town where the traffic lights were horizontal instead of vertical. I was dozing and he shook me awake, slightly panicked, to ask me if the light was red or green. Once he figured out where the green light was, though, he was fine.

He's never had an issue with clothing, because he's generally a very casual dresser. Jeans and a tee-shirt are hard to mess up. But if he has to wear a shirt and tie, he'll generally go with a white shirt and whatever color tie, because "white goes with everything, right?" Yes, dear :)

He bought a yellow car so he could pick it out more easily in the parking lot. I painted our guest bedroom robin's egg blue and he couldn't tell the difference.

One major thing about colorblindness. Hub is AWESOME at picking out moving targets. He's a great marksman because of that. Doesn't matter if his opponent (paintball) is in all cammies, he can spot them like they're wearing neon signs. Same goes for game.

My brother is colorblind. He cant see colors within colors, so if he has a red shirt with maybe white words in it, he can't tell that the words are white.

My best friend's colorblind. He told me that if you put a red apple next to a green apple, he wouldn't be able to tell them apart, but on their own he can see the red and the green.

One of my friends is red-green colour blind, and last week he asked me, very politely, if my hair had sort of a red shine to it.

My hair is bright red, like, Little Mermaid Ariel red. He could not tell, except in very bright light he said it looked a little bit red. He just figured I had black hair.

I don't think I have the standard red/green colourblindness, since I can usually tell them apart. I can see bright red, but I can't see red light above a certain frequency. Therefore I have trouble distinguishing colours that have a slight tint of red to them - so some shades of pink look grey, some purples look blue, sometimes orange or yellow looks green, and don't even talk to me about brown. I can see all these colours, just not certain shades.

It's a great source of entertainment for people, upon discovering that I'm colourblind, to hold up an endless sequence of objects and demand that I attempt to identify their colour. They don't seem to realise it could be considered a tad insensitive. In fact, occasionally they even get offended if I refuse to play along.

I did often colour the sky purple at school, and was generally laughed at. This led to me refusing to work in colour, and so nowadays most of my art is in shades of grey. Nice dependable HB (Although, photoshop is a life-saver, because I can do the colours by the numbers).

While I was student teaching 9th graders, we discovered that one of the boys was colorblind. I'd write on the board in different colors for different groups and he wouldn't be able to tell what group was assigned which pages. Eventually my mentor and I guessed he might be colorblind and pulled up one of those color hidden image-dot things on the computer. He swore he couldn't see the hidden number and thought we were tricking him somehow. We sent a note to his parents with our suspicions. Sure enough, boy turned out to be colorblind, amazing that he'd gotten that far without knowing it yet. :P

I new a guy in college who was colorblind and almost always just wore black as a result. Looked very gothic because of it. I think his new fiance has been getting some color into his wardrobe now though.

Try http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckImage.php

For example, here's your banner as seen by a deuteranope (the most common type of red-green color blindness:

BTW, I *HATE* the term "color blindness". I prefer "color confusion", but the rest of the English-speaking world hasn't gotten behind me on this one yet.

The banner is hillarious. I could not see a single difference between the two -- oh yeah, I am color blind.

I sat next to a kid that was color blind in History class in highschool. This teacher really liked the coloring-maps-thing. it was pretty funny on his first map, cuz i didn't know that he was colorblind, I just thought "this dude just does not care.." but eventually he had me helping him pick out the appropriate colors- by the end of the semester we kinda had a system where we would do it together, like i would color my map's Africa then hand him the pencil and say "color Africa."

As a red/green colorblind guy myself, I can tell you it has had almost no impact on my life whatsoever. Nothing makes me really different from anyone else. Basically, I just have a hard time distinguishing colors if they're close in intensity. All through elementary school, I had a hard time telling green from brown, blue from purple, metallic green from silver, and light pink from light green, or grey. I got teased once in first grade when I accidentally colored the entire Pacific Ocean purple. I also recall having an argument with another kid over whether or not I could see color and not just black and white. Nowadays, I can kinda tell if I just focus really hard. Only thing that sucks about it is that I can't fly for the air force (my dream).

antfarmer's post just reminded me of when my brother is playing video games. We'll commonly have an exchange kind of like this:

"Wait, get that guy!"

"What guy?" *BOOM* "How'd you see him?!"

"Pay more attention to the screen!"

okay, so my uncle is red/green color blind. I went and stayed with his family for like a week when i was around twelve so of course he got the standard questions

from what I remember he could tell red and green apart when they were right next to each other, but not when they were apart he had no idea.

also he couldn't really tell the difference between shades.

something i always wonder is what colors are colorblind people are actually seeing. for instance, some one said earlier that they saw most colors as brown, but how do they know for sure what brown looks like? after all, we already know that their colors are skewed, and its not like they were ever not color blind, so maybe the color they were taught was brown was actually some other color to us.

I dont know, just one of those thoughts that occurs to me in the middle of the night.

"Do you believe in a life after death"

"Not a chance in Hell"
-Saints and Soldiers