Eight, three or nothing? One test for color blindness/ColourBlindness.com
Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., think they’ve come up with a way to help scientists and students with one of the countries most widespread and yet overlooked disabilities deal with visual data in scientific and other reports.
In a study published at PLOS One, they suggest doing away with rainbow-color schemes impossible to decipher for almost one in 10 men and replacing them with a yellow-blue color palette visible even to those with what the scientists call “color vision deficiency (CVD),”or what is more commonly known as color blindness.
Complete color blindness is rare, according to the National Eye Institute, but about 8 percent of men suffer from red-green color blindness, and there is no cure. Color blindness made the news during the World Cup soccer matches in July when Twitter lit up with angry Tweets from color-blind soccer fans unable to tell the red team from the green team.
“Roars of frustration jumped from sitting rooms to social media as fans worldwide branded Russia v Saudi Arabia ‘a disgrace,'” the BBC reported. “A massive 320 million people worldwide are colour-blind. Statistically, the condition affects one player in every men’s football team. And with almost half the planet projected to watch the World Cup, many are furious that its organiser Fifa has failed to take account of what they can and can’t see.”
The BBC website even provided a doctored photo of the match to show color-sighted soccer fans the lookalike nature of the uniforms seen by color-blind fans.
But the problems associated with visuals unreadable by the colorblind go far beyond sports. Scientists at Harvard University years ago discovered that a blood flow test used to detect atherosclerosis and heart disease was seriously flawed due to its rainbow-colored portrayal of blood flow.
When scientists took fancy, 3D models with multi-colored displays and converted them to 2D models with a red-to-black, graded color-scheme, they discovered diagnostic accuracy improved from 39 percent to 91 percent.
No laughing matter
The color blind, of course, largely know their disability as a frustration or party entertainment. When people find out someone is color blind, they too often want to a play a stupid, little guessing game of “What color is this? What color is that? Or what color does this look like to you?”
That color blindness could cause real problems has never trickled down to the majority of society.
The Pacific Northwest scientists noted that though color blindness has been a well-known disability “for decades, colormaps with many colors across the visual spectra are often used to represent data, leading to the potential for misinterpretation or difficulty with interpretation by someone with this deficiency. ”
The misinterpretation problem is real and has to do with more than just colormaps. Ask any driver who has to pay extra attention because red lights on street corners don’t pop out the way they do for the non-colorblind, or any mariner who has tried to navigate home by the use of red and green navigation lights at night.
Licensed mariners are required to be able to see red, green, blue and yellow. Changing the global navigation system to assist the color blind would be costly and time-consuming, but the Northwest lab scientists say they’ve found an easy fix for the red-green-blue-yellow color scheme that can confuse so many readers of scientific literature or other studies.
They have developed a colormap scheme that not only works for the color blind but is functional for everyone. They are offering the computer code for the program to other scientists.
“While it may take some time for the full scientific community to both be aware of the need to choose appropriate colormaps and agree on preferred colormaps,” they write, “we hope the code we provide here can help with this transition by allowing others to experiment with the different aspects of colormap design and see how the various characteristics of a colormap affect its interpretation.”
The scientists concede, however, the difficulties of bringing about change.
The full palette of colors “is more aesthetically pleasing to some and covers more colors for those with normal vision, allowing greater visual perception sensitivity,” they write.
As a result, they report they are continuing to pursue more “aesthetically pleasing colormaps, that are perpetually linear for all people. (But) it is not clear yet if this task is possible….”
“We hope to reduce the number of non-perceptually uniform and rainbow-style colormaps being used as default in scientific data analysis software, and to increase the availability of CVD-friendly colormaps so the estimated more than 600 million individuals worldwide with CVD can interpret and perceive data like the rest of the population,” the wrote.
There is little real incentive for change. Color blindness is not among the dozens of disabilities covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandated wheelchair access for commercial and government buildings across the U.S. and knocked down many other everyday barriers to those with disabilities.
An Iowa science consultant has labeled color blindness the “invisible disability.”
Editor’s note: The author of this story is color blind, but does not consider it a major disability. He does get tired of the stupid questions as to what colors he sees.
Categories: News
Hard to realize that our state primary is less than two weeks away? Aug 21st.
Everywhere I look blogs have Done-Leavy merit badges to show their Houston Texas Super PAC support…
Treadwell was on the radio trying to paint a humble picture of the East Coast millionaire who started PT Capital with Alice Rogoff?
I guess the Rubensteins have 2 candidates under their thumbs in this coming election? Walker and Treadwell.
Where are the local debates?
How are we going to reign in the bloated state budget?
Gas to Market?
Gas to Alaskans on Railbelt?
What is the plan for education reform?
Renewable Energy?
There is no plan other than Delay, Delay, Austerity for the workers.
At least Begich has an Alaskan based knowledge of the problems faced by our rural economies.
I feel we need a “Homegrown”Governor to address poverty and homelessness plaguing our community… They lead to drug addiction, crime and violence.
How about the idea that drug addiction leads to homelessness, crime, violence, and poverty?
Obviously this is a “two way” street we are dealing with.
I get a bit frustrated when authors of articles similar to this one state that they don’t consider their colorblindness to be a major disability. Not because they aren’t being accurate, but because it spreads the general impression that this isn’t a big deal. As I write at dichromat.com, for the significant number of us with more severe forms of color deficiency, life can be much more difficult than most people think.
Wayne: i didn’t mean to suggest that it can’t be a disability. it blocks certain careers, and certainly pisses me off with tool manufactures in these days of cordless power tools. you’d think with a big share of their customers men, they’d figure out that a red light that turns green to tell you a battery is charged is bullshit.
but i don’t think of it as major handicap, such as being mentally challenged (which i’d put at the top of the heap), or blind or confined to a wheelchair with the constraints those handicaps place on everyday life.
Hi Craig… yes, I cannot count the number of times I’ve been frustrated by supposedly multi-colored LEDs on devices. As with the Ishihara above, they are all gray to me.
A “3”? I see a 38. I think it means one to many beers.
Actually, I was joking. I see an 8. But, I find it interesting he sees a “3” when the 8 is the same color around and not shaded to favor a “3” regardless of colorblindness.
What I see is “shaded to favor a ‘3’” if the person sees the orangish shaded portions of the “8” as similar to the greenish background.
For some reason I see those orangish shaded circles and you do not. I suspect that means something to the experts on colorblindness.
Forgive me Bill, there are 3 different shades of color in the 8. My point being that I would think if one could make a 3 out of the 8 using the same colors as the 8, why can’t they see the 8? I could see bypassing the 8 all together though.
I can only describe what I see, Bryan. There are two shades of pinks and two shades of orange in the 8. If you only see three colors, then one of those orange shades doesn’t show up for you IMO.
The 3 darker orange circles are also speckled and they are all the same size. The lighter orange ones are of different sizes. Some of the darker pink circles are also speckled but the same shade as those un-speckled ones, too.
I’m guessing that if those orange circles are showing up as similar to the green background, then one would see a 3, rather than an 8.
I see a 3. I would contribute to the discussion, but I clearly can’t see the shades you guys are talking about! 😀
You are correct Bill. There are 4. My cellphone mistake.
So I see a 3…..what do you see and what does it mean?
*Steve Simpson*
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welcome to the world of the red-green blind. see the comment above, and note that you are both male. or at least have male gender names.