Comment by marcus_holmes
2 years ago
Yes! I've had some lengthy discussions with UI designers trying to get them to understand this exact point. I can see that they're red and green, I just don't notice that they're red and green.
2 years ago
Yes! I've had some lengthy discussions with UI designers trying to get them to understand this exact point. I can see that they're red and green, I just don't notice that they're red and green.
Reminds them that colors and shapes must be different in a UI. They’re supposed to learn that super early in their career.
Interesting, does playing a lot of games with a toddler asking them to distinguish between colors reduces the chance that they have your type of colourblindness? Since you can see the individual colors but need to concentrate on them, I wonder if playing such games make the child learn to notice the colors?
Like the other person said, most forms of colorblindness is caused by genetics--specifically, recessive traits. So, it's the sort of trait that will run in the family.
To help explain our experience, it's like trying to distinguish between two similar shades of yellow. It'll be clear and obvious that both are the color yellow. When there's only one example of each standing next to each other, it'll be easy to tell which shade is the lighter one, even if it's only slightly different. But if you had a sea of examples and are asked to pick out which yellows are slightly lighter than the other ones, then it might cause you to stop and study them for awhile to figure it out.
It's just like that for the common forms of colorblindness (where the color cones in the eyes are bent, but not missing), but instead of this metaphorical "yellow" it's this special "red-and-green" color that we see that's different from what everyone else sees. It's like trying to distinguish between two different shades of the same color, where it's obvious which is which when there's only two examples to compare to but not so much when your entire field of vision has bits of one hidden amongst a sea of the other. It's like red and green are a spectrum of the same color rather than being two separate ones.
Mine is genetic, inherited from my maternal grandfather.
My mother was an artist, spent ages testing my colour range with a set of Pantone colour swatches, just out of curiosity rather than as an attempt to cure it. That's how I know I see shade better than colour - she would show me two swatches that differed slightly in colour and then two that differed only in shade (or shade/tone/tint to be accurate). I could tell the shade differences apart better than the colour differences.
So I'm not sure that early training would help. But it couldn't hurt