Color Blindness in Day-to-Day Life
Now that you understand color vision and color blindness, you can begin to understand some of the day-to-day effects of color blindness. I went the other direction: finding out I was color blind at the age of six and trying to figure out why things look the way they do since then. Here are some of the day-to-day consequences of having the protanomaly color deficiency (thus seeing mixed colors differently and having a very dull sense of red). Some of these examples make more sense than others. They're all like tiny puzzles!
- Purple almost always looks blue to me.
- I'm afraid to go clothes shopping by myself and I rode around on a purple bicycle for two years of my childhood before anyone told me (and I'll never get those two years back, I might add)!
- Red pens are black pens. I don't care what you say!
- If I take a test with a black pen and it is returned with corrections written in red pen, confusion ensues. I spend the rest of the period trying to find all the comments and corrections based on hand-writing, not color. However, if I take the test outside and look at it under sunlight, I can see the red (the sun is magic)!
- I only see two obvious colors in a rainbow.
- To me, rainbows are blue and yellow. There's probably some mixing between those two colors that is not so obvious, but there's certainly no red!
- I can't tell when red meat is ready to eat.
- Given my love for red meat, this will surely be my demise. The dim lighting in fancy restaurants doesn't help a thing when I try to inspect my medium-rare steak. I have to ask the person next to me if my steak is cooked well enough. Plan B is to squeeze it with my fork and see how much it bleeds.
- Put down the colored chalk set please!
- When a teacher whips out the six-colored chalk set to illustrate a point, that point is wasted on me. I can usually separate the six colors into two or three categories, and at that point it becomes a game and I stop paying attention. I can't blame my eyes for that one.
- Yellow and green traffic lights look the same, sometimes.
- If it's dark outside, I have no trouble telling the two apart. If the sun is out, not only do I have trouble telling the yellow and green lights apart, it's nearly impossible for me to see when the red light is on. Luckily, when the sun is out, I can see the positions of the traffic lights. And if none of the traffic lights appear to be on, I just assume that it's red. So don't be afraid to drive near me because I can't tell the traffic lights apart. Be afraid to drive near me because I'm a bad driver.
- I didn't feel so smart in kindergarten.
- Between the color flash-card tests and the green suns I was apparently drawing with my crayons, kindergarten was not exactly the high-point of my life.
- Thank goodness for those little brown spots on bananas!
- They say that bananas go from being green to yellow when they ripen. To me, they go from being yellow to yellow, so I only trust the spots. Bananas rule!
- That one game of soccer...
- When I was a kid, I played in this one game of soccer where my team had green jerseys and the opponents had yellow jerseys. Somewhere in the middle of this game, the sun started shining in such a way that I could not tell the jerseys apart anymore. This was the worst game of soccer I've played in my life. I quit soccer and took up bowling. I showed them.
- Choosing colors for webpages is always an adventure.
- The way this normally plays out is that I choose the color blue for all of my links. Then everyone complains that it's hard to read blue links on a dark background. The yellow links on this website were not my idea... they better look good!
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