My husband and I went to an exhibition about the solar system at our local natural history museum. There was also an exhibition for children about the human body with really good explanations how genes work, how our ear works, stuff like that.
We came to the part about the eyes and there was an explanation of colorblindness and the different forms together with the tests. You know - the circles with dots where you have to read the number. Anyway, I forgot why but he started reading out the numbers. And well, he got one of them wrong. Not the test for full-on red-green blindness, but he can’t tell certain shades apart.
In hindsight I had noticed that he sometimes confuses names for colors apart from the basic ones or that he doesn’t like it when I identify an object by its color (e.g. “give me the pink one”). But I’d always chalked it up to German not being his mother language.
That’s actually really interesting. My understanding is that colorblindness is one of the better accommodated deficiencies…? A colleague called me out once when I used a data visualization that wasn’t particularly colorblind friendly, so it’s something I try to accommodate as well. Would love to hear if he has experienced any other difficulties (or a lack of)
On this topic… I think the funniest way I saw was someone on Reddit asking why a video game dialogue refers to an anime girl as being green when her hair color is “gray”
Data presentation software has safe colors option.
Color blindness affects 8% of Caucasian males, very rare in females.
Color blindness affects 8% of Caucasian males, very rare in females.
interesting, my gf is colour blind, white Caucasian… Well ,I think she is, maybe I’m colour blind and she’s bright purple ?.
I guess it’s pretty easy for him. It seems like he has a very mild form and can’t tell certain shades apart. I think it was something like yellow and grass green or red and orange. So he hasn’t had any noticable problems.
My ex used to argue with me about colors all the time. It was odd. Then one day he told me he really liked my grey sweater. I was like I don’t own a grey sweater. He said yes you do, and pulled it out of my drawer. It was my light purple sweater. That’s how we found out he was slightly color blind.
I often get into similar “fights”, but because of mismatching colour terms. For example, if Siegfrieda’s coat is “cinza” grey:
For me the colour is a bit too warm to be “cinza” grey, it’s more like “castanho” brown. But my mum insists it’s grey.
(She’s probably in the right, though. My mental colour palette is all fucked up.)
I’d describe your cat’s fur as gray too, but color perception is really weird…
A decade or so ago, there was a big argument online about the color of a dress that some people saw as blue/black and others white/gold:
I find that the names of animal colors can be very…aspirational. Blue dogs are my go-to example.
I have a similar argument with my mother, who claims the tile and fixtures in her (very dated) bathroom are battleship grey.
To me, they’re a light dusky blue, as if you mixed a light shade of grey with baby blue, and they clash horribly with the truly grey marble around her sink.
This argument has existed for 30+ years without resolution.
From that image, I’d say it looks grey, hands down. There doesn’t appear to be any hint of brown there.
Man, colour perception is weird
That’s nuts, I was like why is she deferring to her mom? Cats obviously brown! So weird
I had a tabby that we always described as black and grey, but if you really looked closely, he didn’t really have any grey, it was various shades of tan, and looked grey against the black stripes.
Most people agree with her. But for me calling such a warm tone “grey” is weird, it’s like calling your typical red apple “pink” instead of “red”, you know? To complicate it further I typically refer to fur colour with the same words I’d use for human hair colour, and I’m not sure they don’t map 1:1 with colours used for objects.
(Another situation this pops up is when talking about magenta. But it’s more like a discussion about the “main” colour vs. hue.)
Man, colour perception is weird
It is! And colour words are weird too. And they somewhat influence your perception, too.
My mom says the dog is black. I say he is gray.
White and gold
All dogs are gold. At least in spirit!
For me he’s mostly black (at least in this picture), but I can get why you’d call him grey as a whole.
I’m surprised this didn’t develop into another fight. How did he react to you saying he was color blind? Or did he figure it out first?
It didn’t turn into a fight, we both thought it was hilarious. He was like wait, is it really purple, then we both laughed about it a bunch and I looked up the color blind tests with the numbers hidden in colored dots and he realized that he could see the numbers in most of them but there were a few that he had to ask me if there really was anything there or if it was just plain dots to mess with people. Afterwards there were times he would start arguing with me about colors again and I’d make a comment about my grey sweater and then we’d both just end up laughing.
it’s interesting to hear someone getting that far into their life without knowing about it. I guess for lower end shade, if you grew up with it you just always expected that’s how it normally looks.
A lot of people think colorblindness is an on-off switch, if you’re colorblind you only see in black/white/gray or that you can’t tell the difference between red and green but you can see the other colors. But that’s just not how it works.
Colorblindness comes in varying degrees of deficiency and a lot of people fall into that category where it doesn’t affect them in any noticeable way. In fact, for most cases, it may be more accurate to call it color vision deficiency rather than colorblindness. Like they can easily tell the difference between a red traffic light versus a green one, or a red apple versus a green apple. Plus, there are many types of color blindness beyond the well-known red-green type.
So, for someone who can clearly see the difference between a red light and a green light, if they didn’t know any better, they’d assume they aren’t color blind. So unless they happen to connect the dots (pun) after seeing an Ishihara test or just noticing lots of little situations where they’d identified something as the wrong color, it’s very possible to not know. Lots of people have good vision through their young adult life, so never get tested. And most of the time when people are discussing colors, they aren’t getting super specific so you might not notice there’s a difference between Buff Slate Gray and Milky Seawater.
To add experience to your description: I can easily tell the difference between a red light and a green light. I however did not know that the walking person symbol (USA) is in fact white, not green.
I always just assumed it was green until I had an embarrassing conversation with someone from Indonesia I was hosting who said,
“Crossing in this country is so easy; I just wait for the white man and then I go.”
I thought he was just being low-key racist and started to point out that the area we were in didn’t have very many white people around until he clarified he was just talking about the crossing signal.
I can tell the difference between the red and green light - but if a left turn turn light comes on while the red remains (that is only left turns no going straight) I’ll probably miss it because the green is so faint and red obvious
Yeah, especially since ive been officially tested for it multiple times, have other people not?
Not as much since I was younger but I still feel like I still get tested every 4 or 5 years
Maybe recency bias, now that i think about it, because I was tested semi-recently. I don’t remember why lol I think it was my onboarding physical at my job, maybe?
I have had to switch providers a couple of times so I suppose that could be related as well.
It also could be a maleness thing. There is a formal test tho
It’s nice he found out in a way that didn’t really impact his day to day, I have a friend who found out by enrolling in flight school in college and he was pretty sad about it
Discovering your colorblind was a common enough occurrence in our electronics lab (you need to look at colored lines to determine a resistor’s resistance) that they had policies for it.
I constantly got grades deducted in shop-class for using the wrong resistors (even though my calculation were always right). Even kept arguing with the teacher about how I did’t use the wrong one … but we never put it together.
I only found out a couple of years later during the conscription physical. Then it all made sense …
I was in college when my mom brought the books home one weekend. As she suspected my sister was also colorblind. Mom gets three wrong and you need more than three to be colorblind - but latter she was working in a clothing store and a customer ask for a discount for some stain she couldn’t see but the manager saw it from 10 feet away and gave the discount.
Do colour blind people see red things as green or green things as red?
Yes
Sometimes. My wife confuses blue and green.
This could be cultural, especially in SEA some languages don’t even distinguish between blue and green. Or it could be the rather rare form of colour blindness called Tritanopes. Deuteranopes is the more common red-green one.
You’ll usually see red as red and green as green. It’s just that under some lighting conditions they look the same, so your brain will has to pick one. For the most part there are enough context clues for your brain to figure out what colour it actually is, which why it can go unnoticed for a long time, especially if only have a mild version.
It’s not that it’s grey, it’s just that they look like very similar colors.
Exactly. Some shades of red/green (also reddish-brown) just look the same. But they don’t look grey, because grey looks different :D
There are several different types of color blindness, so it depends. In case of reds greens blindness I think they see both as grey.
I have a type of color blindness called tritanomaly, which is blue/green deficiency. I can still see most greens and some blues but there’s a range I can’t see. They’re sometimes gray or silver and other times I can watch the color kind of vaguely flicker between silver and blue while looking at it. We discovered it when I was a teenager but I didn’t officially get diagnosed until in my 30s.
the circles with dots where you have to read the number
Ishihara tests.
I took an online test back in the day and had some unexpected results.
Seriously though - in modern times, it is bizarre anyone goes undiagnosed. 20th century, sure, it only really mattered if you tried being a pilot. But it’s like 10% of all men, globally, and the tests are literally “if you can read this, you’re normal” and “if you can read this, take a pamphlet.”
Thanks, I didn’t know they had a name other than “colorblindness test” :D
1% of females as well, but few know that even though there must be a lot out there.
women are also likely to have 4 cones instead of the usual 3 for color, so thier color perception is enhanced though its not common. rarer they could have 5. birds have 4 and superior color perception than humans, besides thier visual acuity. and some animals even better.
Red chalk on a wet (green) blackboard is like magic ink
