Sort of.
I had my eyes checked last week (for the first time in three or four years) and discovered that I’m color blind. Sort of. It’s minor enough that it’s never been an issue from a functional standpoint, apparently, and this is the first time that I’ve ever had this problem diagnosed. I went on line to check out some of the tests to confirm it, and I do show up as red-green color blind, but only mildly. That is, I can sometimes make out the things that normal sighted are supposed to see, but some of them just barely very dim, and I can see some (but not all) of the numbers that true red-green color blind people aren’t supposed to at all. On the ones that have one number for normal, and a different one for color-blind, I see the color-blind one more clearly, but I can actually see both. And I’ve never had any trouble distinguishing red from green traffic lights (which would be the biggest problem, I would think, though fully color-blind people know from position). When I look at the pictures that show what the world looks like to normal and deficient eyes, I can very clearly see the vivid red dress as red, whereas it should be more of a greenish color if I were fully color blind. I wonder what this page looks like to someone with no red receptors? Are both pictures the same? And it makes me wonder what the red dress would look like to someone with normal vision (something I’ve never wondered before, because I’ve always thought I had normal vision).
So, the question is, have I always had this borderline condition, and it’s only become apparent now, or was I much better in my youth (I never failed a test as a kid) and have deteriorated a lot with mileage? I’m guessing that maybe I was always borderline, but far enough over the border toward normal earlier that I always passed the test, not realizing that I could have been seeing the numbers more clearly had my color sight been better, and perhaps with age, I’ve drifted into a region where I don’t fully pass any more, but am still a long way from being unable to distinguish red from green.
Anyway, the opthalmologist recommended a follow-up visit to a neuro-opthalmologist, just to make sure that there wasn’t something else going on (just as a precaution, because it’s unlikely that it’s caused by anything serious).
I’ve been red-green colorblind, and known about it for many years. I find that it only comes up in a few ways.
Red-LED drive-thru screens (or red LED signs in general). I can’t for the life of me read these things in bright daylight. They look completely blank to me, and I feel like an ass every time I have to explain to the order-taker that I can’t tell if my order looks ok on the screen or not. Blue-green LEDs are a much better choice, IMHO.
Powerpoint graphs with color-coded lines. Just DON’T, ok? Yes, it is an issue, and I will raise a stink if you persist in doing this. Of course, this ends up in my having to reveal that I’m colorblind, and the inevitable confusion from other people who then imagine that I only see in black and white.
Lastly, being in the computer world, I see a lot of hardware with amber and green LED status lights on them. To me, both just look ‘bright’. If I stare at it long enough, and have another one to compare it too, I can tell the difference, but it certainly isn’t obvious.
My wife has accused me of slight color-blindness because some things that are supposed to be orange look pink to me. If so it would have to be an extremely subtle problem since the missing color in that case is neither blue nor red nor green.
Is this a roundabout way of asking for opinions on the new web-site color scheme?:-)
Well, whether it is or not, I liked the old scheme better. The contrast on this one is a bit low, though not problematically so.
Is this a roundabout way of asking for opinions on the new web-site color scheme?
No, not really. In fact, not at all, but I do appreciate the input. Not sure if I’ll be able to do anything about it in the near term. Is there a CSS expert in the house who could help?
Powerpoint graphs with color-coded lines. Just DON’T, ok? Yes, it is an issue, and I will raise a stink if you persist in doing this.
Amen!
Lastly, being in the computer world, I see a lot of hardware with amber and green LED status lights on them. To me, both just look ‘bright’. If I stare at it long enough, and have another one to compare it too, I can tell the difference, but it certainly isn’t obvious.
Distinguishing between bright yellow and bright green is a problem that I have, too. (The red, yellow, and green gumdrop buttons on the menu bar were a minor annoyance when Apple first released Mac OS X — under bright ambient light the yellow and green buttons were hard to tell apart. Fortunately, they’re always in the same order.) And I’m just like Rand — I can see green, but it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish subtleties and mixtures.
I suspect I know what’s going on. A significant number of males (10% or so, IIRC) are missing the green photoreceptor. But I’ve read that some of us in that group also have red receptors of two different types that respond most strongly to two different frequencies of red light. The result is that we can recognize various shades of green from the difference in responses from the two types of sensors, but since it’s an “extrapolation” exercise rather than an “interpolation” as it is for people who do have green receptors, we aren’t very good at it.
My wife is sometimes surprised that I can’t detect subtle greens in colors or patterns that are glaringly obvious to her. On the other hand, I can distinguish between shades of red much more accurately than she can.
My father was red-green color blind (I’m not). He had a big problem with traffic lights — there was a town in Oklahoma we used to go through regularly, where they had a cheap traffic light with only three bulbs. Green on top in one direction, red on top in the other, and once in a while they’d take it down to replace a bulb and put it back 90 degrees out…
For years, many traffic lights here in Texas had a strong blue component in the green. Dad said it helped. I don’t know what he would have done with LED traffic lights, but of course nowadays they’re also coded by position.
The strangest thing about it was color TV. Dad couldn’t tell red from green on the television, either, but he could reliably distinguish yellow from either of them!
Regards,
Ric
I had a college professor with an unusual form of color blindness. He had 3 types of color receptors. But one, I think the green, had a mutation that made it sensitive to a color very close to the red.
Rand, you don’t need to know much CSS if you use firefox and the Firebug extension. It allows you to inspect the CSS while browsing a page and make changes on the fly. Great way to learn CSS without screwing stuff up.
Time to start eating your spinach. Stock up on carotenoids to improve eye health. Also, bilberry fruit seems to have a nourishing effect for the eyes in that possibly improves blood flow to the ocular region.
Vitamin Shoppe or GNC will have several Super-food drink mixes packed with antioxidants and gut cultures. Some taste like they’ve been strained through a dirty sock full of rhinoceros dung. Others actually have a decent fruity taste to them. I’d say just mix whatever with your favorite smoothie blend. You can never go wrong with the holy trinity of smoothie blends: strawberry, blueberry, banana.
In a blender add the following:
Handful of blueberries 1-2 oz – 30-60gram
Handful of strawberries 3-4 oz
Half large banana – 3-4 oz
1/4c of pomegranate juice – 2 oz
One scoop of either: protein powder, superfood powder, or Acai superfruit powder.
1/4c of yogurt – 2 oz
Top off mixture with milk
puree till smoothe
All of this just fits into the Magic Bullet blender cups. I’ve had mine going on 3 years now and still blends quickly and completely. It is so powerful it will turn straight frozen strawberries into sorbet. Though it has gotten noticeably louder over time.
Oh, and if you don’t have a digital electric kitchen scale yet — get one! I mostly never use a measuring cup for anything any more. Just make sure it has a “tare” function and measures in both ounces and grams. The ones that max out at 5 lbs usually have the best increment count. The ones that max out at 10 lbs usually count in 5-10 gram increments. The ones that count 1-2 gram increments are much more precise.
IIRC, color blindness occurs when slight mutations in the genes that code for the red or green pigment in your eyes cause their absorption spectrum to overlap more than they usually do (which is a fair amount).
So, yeah, it would be there from birth, would not change with age, and there would be exactly zip you could do about it.
That said, other changes in your vision with age — e.g. the increasing opacity of the lens, crap floating in the eyeball, the greater difficulty focussing the eyes for true sharp binocular vision, et cetera — could exacerbate the problem, so that you only really notice it now.
Full bore red/green colorblind here.
Dim light is what gets me. If bright enough, I can more or less tell red/green/amber apart. But a traffic light against an overcast sky looks like it si completely out of order…no light at all.
And a red laser pointer on a light colored powerpoint is just plain impossible.