People with a colour vision deficiency are able to see things as clearly as other people but they get confused with shades of Reds and Greens. There are different types of colour blindness and there are extremely rare cases where people are unable to see any colour at all.
Some people think traffic lights are an issue for everyone suffering from a colour vision deficiency, but they are wrong. The colours for traffic lights are very well chosen and they are always arranged in a certain order. So this is not a problem at all for most colour-blind people.
So we asked a patient what is being colour-blind (iRochromatic) really like? And he said –
“Colour blindness can be like watching television with the red and green knobs broken!”
In addition –
- Our sunrises and sunsets are not interesting
- Our rainbows are plain
- Our fruit is not ripe
- Our meat is not cooked
- Our clothes do not go together
- Our paint charts are a blur
- Our printer/camera batteries are never low
- We all have a box of 24 different coloured pencils we never use
- Red and green dot clearance sales are great
- Travel route coding and signs are a waste of time
- A Sunburn can’t really be seen, only if the skin is almost glowing.
- There is no difference between the colours for vacant (green) and occupied (red).
- Flowers and fruits can’t be that easily spotted sometimes.
- And you can’t tell if a fruit or vegetable is ripe or not yet.
…and that’s just for starters!”
Another patient said “Some of my friends upon hearing about my colour-blindness made fun of me, and they continue to do so. This was immensely frustrating initially but as time passed I started to take these remarks in a sportive manner and ended up creating curt and snappy replies to almost all the colour-blind jokes in the book.”
“I first realized I was colour-blind at the age of twenty.
The discovery was flabbergasting. It took a while to understand the possibility and probability of me confusing two colours for 20 years straight without doubting that something was wrong with what I saw. I for twenty years straight I had been falling prey to the solipsism fallacy. I was so sure that the way I saw the world was the only truth, but now I know that it was only my truth.”
Currently, there is no cure for colour blindness (iRochromatic), but until then, at least a good number of colour blind people can have some idea of what colours look like and decide if they’re missing out on anything by using our testing kits and then using our lenses. The testing kits are available for purchase via our web site – click here – or visit one of our Optometrists in your area for a more detailed test.
