What is Color Blindness?

Color Blindness adj.  
     1. Partial or complete inability to distinguish between
         certain colors;
     2. in the UK, known as “Daltonism”

Some degree of blindness affects at least one out of twelve men (8% of men and 1% of women). The most common kind is Red/Green color blindness.

Red/green color blindness is a range of impairments but generally speaking, greens, reds and oranges look “yellow”;  cyans and magentas look “gray.”  For others, primary colors are discernable, but pastel colors cause difficulties.

Why is this disability such a silent one?  Perhaps because in the past, unless one wanted to follow certain career paths or join the Navy or Air Force, one could adopt certain compensation strategies and learn to hide the limitations.  Color blind people learn to use many cues to help: like knowing that red traffic lights are generally at the top of a signal housing, and green at the bottom.  Also, many color blind people learned they were color blind through an embarrassing situation: one friend found out on the first day of kindergarten when, “every kid in the class turned around and started laughing at me because I had colored the grass the wrong color.”

There are many interesting facts about color blindness: the incidence seems to be higher in countries the further north you go.  In stable populations, the incidence seems to increase the closer you get to the coast.  Why?  No one knows, but there is increased research in this area.

The world is changing.  Today more and more people have to deal with computers in school, their jobs and their daily lives. Decoding the color-coded information on a computer screen can cause difficulties for the color blind.  Students can be left behind their classmates; employees’ career advancement can be thwarted.

Color is used on computers to help layer and explain information.  There are guidelines for choosing safe colors, but they are rarely followed, especially on the world wide web where more and more information and study materials are found.  Even as simple a feature as followed web links being color-coded can be a problem.  Being color blind can negatively affect the efficiency with which people deal with their studies or jobs on computers.   eyePilot software is a set of tools that can help.

Click HERE to see an animated Flash demo of the eyePilot tools.