Color Vision

A Cure for Color Blindness May Be Found

Researchers at the University of Washington report in the journal Nature that they have been able to restore full color vision to adult monkeys born without the ability to distinguish between the colors red and green.

According to National Public Radio, scientists who study color vision are calling the study dazzling.

Until now scientists thought that this sort of therapy was not possible. However, the University of Washington team were able to introduce therapeutic genes into the light-sensing cells at the back of the eye of adult male squirrel monkeys, who are born red-green colorblind.

Furthermore, the monkeys were treated over two years ago and their improvement in color vision has remained stable since.

Link: 'Gene cure' for colour blindness [BBC]

Maps Made Convenient For Color Deficient Individuals

Guest Post by Kristine  [lizbeth_laila@yahoo.com]

Come to think of it, it never occurred to me that maps might just become very unhandy for people like me. Imagine the frustration I have to go through by reading a map and suddenly halting in the middle of the road because I can’t understand where the last road ‘went to’.

Fortunately, Cynthia A. Brewer made an excellent idea over eight years ago when she began creating maps that can accommodate both color blind individuals and those with normal vision. She recommended using map colors which are far away from the confusion lines like blue, light green, whitish green, gray magenta and dark green, since these colors are the least likely to look like any other color to a color blind individual.

I sure hope this catches on with the rest of the world's map-making industries. Like most people, I'd like to see Paris at least once in my life.

15 Tools For Those Who Are Colorblind and Those Who Are Not

Fellow colorblind blogger JNvB, who is based in the Netherlands (www.kleurenblindheid.nl), has developed a list of 15 tools (software and websites) that can help those who are colorblind as well as show those with normal vision how the world appears to colorblind people.

My colleague in colorblindness, Daniel Flück (www.colblindor.com), has posted an English version of the list on his blog, Colblindor.

JNvB is trying to get as much exposure as possible to the post on Coblindor in the hope that readers will return with comments on software or tools that he may have missed.

The list includes tools in the following areas:

• Assistive software for colorblind people
• Colorblindness simulation software
• Online colorblindness simulations
• Color recognition software
• Online color recognition

Link: 15 Tools If You Are (Not) Colorblind

Rejected Because You Have Color Vision Problems?

Guest Post by Kristine [lizbeth_laila@yahoo.com]

There are several career limitations for color deficient individuals like me. I’ve been through the agony of being rejected because of my ‘limitations’. It killed me to find out only recently that I was color vision deficient after taking an Ishihara test as part of a job qualification.  

Daniel Flück, author of the Colblindor website, knows how I feel all too well, as he writes about the plight of color blind jobseekers everywhere. I believe that these restrictions apply only in careers that deal with life and death, such as emergency medicine, firefighting, police work, and the military. I perfectly agree why these jobs require perfect vision and color perspective, but civilian jobs ought to be more lenient.

Being rejected outright because of a “vision problem” is probably the worst part of not getting a job. I hope that employers eventually learn more about color blindness and how judging applicants by their visual health could deprive them of a sizeable portion of the talent pool.

Today's Video Games Are Still Too Visual

Guest Post by Kristine [lizbeth_laila@yahoo.com]

Video games are more appreciated visually than with any other sense. There’s so much information that needs to be processed by our eyes, and most games use colors both to create spectacular visual effects and differentiate between important visual elements during gameplay. Some games, for instance, involve matching colored blocks.

However, Tim McDaniel, a color blind reader of the Ars Technica blog, brought up some pretty intriguing matters. For one, he is a big fan of Battlefield 2142. He enjoys the realistic action and fast gameplay. However, he also finds the game frustrating because of his inability to distinguish between red, green, yellow and brown flags well enough. In a game that depends on capturing the enemy flag, this proves to be a huge disadvantage.

Game designers should realize that a good portion of the gaming population is color blind, and their game design can draw the line whether a color-blind gamer will buy their game or not. Alternative options such as changing certain colors, hues or contrasts might be a good idea for starters. An option for on-screen callouts for certain objects/players on the field will also be helpful.

McDaniel and millions of other color-blind gamers will appreciate it if gaming companies started to consider such issues in their game designs.

Link:  Color-blind gamers: common. Developer awareness? Minimal

Surfing From A Color Blind Perspective

Guest Post by Kristine [lizbeth_laila@yahoo.com]

This article in the Colourlovers blog tackles how certain websites look to color blind individuals. In this blog, the author posted several popular websites and showed how differently these websites looked to color blind individuals and those with normal vision. Interestingly enough, he also posted this Color Blind Web Page Filter where it filters out colors according to the type of color deficiency an individual has.

Being color blind, I naturally couldn't see how well the Filter worked, so I asked one of my web designer friends to try it out for me. While we tested some familiar websites on the Filter, he commented that he never thought the Google logo could look so dull.

He then realized that he could unconsciously be making his websites a little hard to view to certain color blind individuals, and began testing his sites through the filter to make sure it was readable to every viewer, color blind or not.

All-in-all, I'm glad to know that the plight of color blind web users is getting a lot of exposure these days. I hope that means websites will start to look better and better for everyone.

Using The Colors That Work

Guest Post by Magnolia – magnoliaf_y@yahoo.com

Geoff Alday is a user experience designer who recently blogged about his colleague's color vision deficiency.

Mr. Alday said that even when he uses software to gauge whether his designs are visible and attractive to people with color blindness, nothing beats having somebody who can really explain the personal experience. So he asked for his colleague's opinion on a certain project he's making.

Many graphic designers make their projects without considering the needs of users with color vision deficiency. Mr. Alday's colleague couldn't tell between the colors red and green – these colors appear to him as gray. So he sees a red-and-black design as gray-and-black, barely distinguishable from each other.

To solve this problem, Mr. Alday used yellow instead of red so his colleague was better able to appreciate the design. 

It would help us all to be more sensitive to other peoples deficiencies, be it in color vision or otherwise. If one color won't work, there's still a whole color wheel to choose from.

Link: Geoff Alday's post on Color Blindness

Props for Contrast

Rob Palmer, of branded07, adds to the thesis that building in contrast is an easy way to address potential issues for color blind visitors of your websites. 

But how do you know if the pages you are designing have enough contrast?  Rob offers this tip:

If you aren’t sure if a page is contrasted enough, one good tip is to desaturate your website (save first) in Fireworks or Adobe Photoshop and see if the images still have an impact. Desaturating the image will remove all the color from the image and this way you will be able to tell if the image has enough contrast without color to be seen.

Link: branded07: Online Web Portfolio of Rob Palmer:· Are we all really that inaccessible?.

Is There a Railroad Surgeon in the House?

I have just stumbled across an obscure and wonderful book, thanks the to efforts of Google to digitize the world's printed material. It's the 1895 edition of Color-vision and Color-blindness: A Practical Manual for Railroad Surgeons by J. Ellis Jennings, MD.  The title alone evokes all kinds of thoughts. Who knew there were such things as railroad surgeons?  They must have been the precursor to flight surgeons.  And who knew that color-blindness was such a problem in the railroads that not just a manual was required on the market, but a practical manual (no esoteric manual for me, thank you very much).

Well, it seems that in the 1890s color-blindness was a big deal. Dr. Jennings informs us that

"In 1875 a serious railway accident occurred in Sweden, which intensely excited public attention. At the investigation which followed it was found that colorblindness was one of the principal causes of the disaster."

Horrors!

You'll enjoy Jenning's history of color-blindness, the evolution of detecting color-blindness among railroaders, and the descriptions of the color blind tests used at the time.  My favorite?  Here's a picture of Thomson's Stick. 

Yep, that's the official name of the test. It's a "stick."

Link: Color-vision and Color-blindness: A Practical Manual for Railroad Surgeons

 

Choosing a Proper Color Scheme

InternetLayout.com uploaded a nice post on selecting a proper color scheme when designing a website. They get a hat tip from me for this closing paragraph to the post:

Finally, it’s worth dropping in a note here about colour blindness. Try to make sure that your design uses colour to make itself aesthetically pleasing, but doesn’t rely on it for anything essential. You wouldn’t believe the statistics for the prevalence of colour blindness (some say as high as 10% are at least partially colour blind), and you need to consider these people too when you’re designing your site they’re at least as important as the people with unusual browsers, for example.

You might like to take a look at your site using www.vischeck.com, which will let you see things the way a colour blind user would. Make sure they can at least still read your text!

Link: Picking a Colour Scheme..