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Last week’s Tone Deafness Test was popular, so this week let’s talk Color Blindness. I am “Color Blind,” though I prefer to say I’m “Color Confused,” as I do see colors — just not, uh, the right ones. I have a condition called Deuteranomaly. Here’s an explanation of the condition from colorvisiontesting.com (warning: some “misused” quotation marks are retained):
Deuteranomaly (five out of 100 males):
The deuteranomalous person is considered “green weak”. Similar to the protanomalous person, he is poor at discriminating small differences in hues in the red, orange, yellow, green region of the spectrum. He makes errors in the naming of hues in this region because they appear somewhat shifted towards red for him. One very important difference between deuteranomalous individuals and protanomalous individuals is deuteranomalous individuals do “not” have the loss of “brightness” problem.From a practical stand point though, many protanomalous and deuteranomalous people breeze through life with very little difficulty doing tasks that require normal color vision. Some may not even be aware that their color perception is in any way different from normal. The only problem they have is passing that “Blank Blank” color vision test.
More after the jump…
The description above sounds about right to me, though I have more problems with green than the other colors. I have owned a lot of green clothes that I thought were black or gray until a helpful friend pointed out my fashion faux pas. As a result, I now own a lot of gray (verifiably gray) clothes. I also have a hard time perceiving the color pink — it usually looks like a light gray; this has contributed to several comical laundry situations over the years! Note: the image at the top of this article supposedly shows the number 49, but I don’t see it at all — I just see a neutral field that looks like marble. (See more images like this at Wikipedia.)
Although computer monitors are often not properly adjusted to show “true” color, you can take an online color vision screening. If that turns up problems, you can take a real color vision test from print sources to identify what’s going on. Another online test shows a variety of sample color plates which might help fine-tune your self-diagnosis. Finally, Wikipedia has an excellent Color Blindness page with many links to additional resources.
So let’s have it, readers: are you Color Blind like me? If so, what flavor of the condition do you have?
Comments (20)
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Me! Same as you! I new that block of marble was supposed to have something in it.
Don’t you love it when people say: “well what color does it look like to you?”
posted by GoingLikeSixty on 6-19-2007 at 12:11 pm
Oh, yeah. Me, my brothers, my uncle, my grandfather, etc., all red-green, to my knowledge.
My favorite was that after I enlisted in the Navy (with hopes of pursuing college and a commissioning program) I discovered that the color “deficient” aren’t allowed to go to the Naval Academy or NROTC. Oops.
posted by Jeremy on 6-19-2007 at 12:29 pm
To be fair, the “49″ in that image is much, much fainter and less outlined that any other color-blindness test I’ve ever seen.
posted by Sara on 6-19-2007 at 1:45 pm
Yeah – I had to look for a few seconds before I painfully saw the 49. Those colors hurt my eyes. I’m not color-blind at all, and the 49 in the image is pretty weak.
posted by Rebecka on 6-19-2007 at 1:50 pm
My professor last semester said he often would be the one to discover students were color blind when they didn’t know it.
The class was “rocks and minerals”, and it would start when there’d be a disagreement about a color. :)
posted by Eric on 6-19-2007 at 3:06 pm
I am not colorblind, but I found that website to be incredibly helpful. I am a first grade teacher. In college they focused on so many types of disabilities and issues that we would face in the classroom. Yet, I can’t recall one instance from a class where they gave us ideas on how to help a colorblind child. And it affects so much of the population. Very cool website! Thanks for pointing it out!
posted by greenstrawberries on 6-19-2007 at 10:28 pm
In the late 60s I was classsified 4-F by the draft board because I was color-blind. Turns out my color-blindness meant I couldn’t see short wavelengths, like violet/indigo/blue (I can’t), but I *could* see into the infrared. The Army thought that was pretty cool and drafted my a$$ anyway because I could see the hostiles in the dark.
I still have nightmares about what I caused because I could see NVA and Victor Charlie in the dark…
Thanks you, U.S. Government.
Doc
posted by Doc on 6-20-2007 at 7:48 am
I can not tell the difference between black,blue,purple and green. Sad, because apparently green is a colour I look good in!
posted by christin on 6-20-2007 at 12:42 pm
Are you sure there is a hidden number in that picture? I’m suffering protanopia – or at least very strong protanomly. In other words this is red-blind, with often the same problems as green-blind or -weak as you are.
There are different types of color blindness tests available online. You might like to have a look at the category Tests of my blog Colblindor, where you can find some of them.
posted by Daniel on 6-20-2007 at 1:01 pm
I can’t even tell that the second number is a nine, and I’m not at al color blind! (That I know of.)
posted by Pointy-Hatted Geek on 6-20-2007 at 5:58 pm
Hmm…well, I got the image from Wikipedia; it’s possible there’s something wrong with it. Not being able to see anything there myself it’s sort of hard to judge whether it’s the image or me. (Or…us! :)
posted by Higgins on 6-20-2007 at 6:28 pm
I have an inherited color blindness, it appears mostly when any of us attempt to play Uno. It says on the box that there are 4 colors I only get red, yellow and that grey stuff. Rather disheartening to have the grandchildren yell, “No Mommom, that’s the wrong color!” My daughter also has it and she also has a real bad sensitivity to light, to the extent that she is required to wear darkly shaded glasses. We also all have different intensities of “night-blindness”.
posted by Carol Tietsworth on 6-21-2007 at 4:03 am
Interesting post and interesting to hear other people’s stories!
I am not colour blind but I do suffer from colour ‘confusion’ like you. But I couldn’t really find anything on the wiki page or in this post that fitted my description.. I can’t really distinguish things that are purple-blue, especially if they are darker hues or a mixture.. I almost always say things are purple when they are MORE blue (let me roll my eyes at those pedantic people with PERFECT colour vision. ugh!) or say things are blue when they are more purple. Even when placed side by side I don’t know which one is MORE blue or purple.
Same with aqua-blue colours which are either more green or more blue, I always get it wrong. Or yellow-green colours. My brother is an artist and he paints, so he deals with a lot of paint colour and pallettes and can almost always tell me that I’m wrong. I don’t have too much problem with reds and yellows.
I can read the numbers fine in the test. But to *name* the colours would be tough!!
posted by Lina Beena on 6-23-2007 at 6:52 am
We had a friend when we were little that was color blind and didn’t tell us. We found out one day while we were playing a very annoying game of RISK.
posted by James on 6-23-2007 at 2:27 pm
I am colour deficient according to the standard Ishihara plates. Why a grown man would want to place coloured dots in a circle is beyond me. The accident causing ability of colour deficient men is frankly, overexaggerated. I can see some numbers when I shouldn’t and none where I should. Those plates are not infallible. The marble square has a number in it written somewhat badly, but can be seen when the computer screen is tilted downwards. Having the screen upright is too bright. Has anyone ever thought that some people may have super colour perception beyond “normal”?
posted by Graeme on 9-24-2007 at 5:58 am
If colour blind (or even normal) people cannot see the image (I am colour blind and I cannot :-(
Try this software eyepilot
at colorhelper dot com or google for it.
It has several tools for colour blind to see colours.. To see this image, select “GRAY” in the options and select “Light” check-box and then set he scale to about 17% and keep clicking on several points in the image.. on clicking certain locations you you should be able to see a faint 49. (for me it works when I click at about (0.25, 0.4) x,y coordinates considering bottom left as origin.
posted by Adam on 12-7-2007 at 5:56 pm
omg im color confused to!
i cant see purple, the color yall call purple I call pink
posted by Alexis on 8-24-2009 at 8:22 pm
Both my dad and my brother are color blind. My dad just has the common red/green one, but my brother has both the red/green problem and one where all shades of blue (blue, purple, etc) look the same. The first time he took the color blindness test as a child, the eye doctor that he was screwing with him and made him take it again.
posted by dee on 11-10-2009 at 1:43 pm
To me, that one looked like 47, but as the Wikipedia article on color vision testing points out, online versions are a bit shaky on accuracy due to monitor configuration issues (or angle of monitor, for those of us on laptops). The print version is the one to trust (and I’ve always passed the print ones with no trouble).
posted by Seanette on 11-10-2009 at 5:15 pm
My mother was colorblind, so was my father, grandmother, grandfather, 2 uncles and great aunt. I am not…for some reason. Phew! I am an artist and I love bright colors! My mother ended up wearing black most of the time(or dark blue, dark purple and dark green)
It was kinda funny sometimes, but usually she could pull it off. White was also good for her, I’m really not sure if she could see any color at all.
posted by Justine on 11-16-2009 at 3:06 am