Comment by fabiandesimone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fabiandesimone | Hacker News Reader

I'm colorblind.

I see the value in this system but I'm not sure how does it actually improve my day to day in the sense that, me not being able to see colors doesn't have that big of a negative impact on my current day to day. (I wanted to be a pilot so being colorblind does have a negative impact sometimes)

A few years back I purchased a pair of ChromaGen color glasses that allow me to see the color red. That was a WTF moment.

The world made sense right then and there: Warning signs, skin, tomatoes, coke can, etc, etc. Is amazing how different (and greenish) the world is to me.

To be honest I don't use them to much: every time I wear them for long, the word is full of colors and once I take them off I return to this green(ish) reality and my mood changes immediately. I feel down right away.

I think I read somewhere that there are around 16.000.000 colorblind people in the US alone. I think this is a market that would pay big money to be able to see properly (I payed 1200 euros for a pair of glasses to just help me see the color red).

I wish someone would find a solution to this.

It's not for making the colors nicer to look at for you but to avoid you putting on clothes which doesn't match in colors and look really off-putting to the non-color-blind (e.g. red pants, pink T-shirt).

It can be more than that. Think safety. When I drive in Quebec the road signs are a slightly different hue than used in Ontario. I had a hard time figuring out which signs were informational - construction after 19h, and the "lane ends 200m" need different reactions.

As far as clothes, I have a "garanimals" system with numbers to match up shirts and pants and optionally ties. Hopefully my wife is merciful and matching my clothes tastefully.

and when she's pissed at you, you look like a clown at work? :D

I am not colorblind, but I did read a review in interest. These are not recommended for driving because they apparently make dim and night more difficult, and things like tunnels can be a problem.

In this regard, and for the purposes of signage, etc. it would be helpful. I'm dealing with blue-green colorblindness right now due to a pretty bad (3+ NS) cataract in my only eye, and while I don't have problems looking at colors on, say, a computer monitor, I often stand in my closet asking myself "Is this shirt blue, or is it green?"

My solution has been to own a lot of grey shirts.

According to the talk (which derived from real case studies), we (in Portugal) have a population of 10% with one of the several variations of color blindness.

In my 1st job (on a small IT department), i had a colleague (from the electronics department) which had a variation of it. Dealing with electronics, means in some form, dealing with color codes, like colored cables, LED's and other instruments, which means he had difficulties dealing with it. It was not very known, and i understood why after the talk, in which there seems to be a stigma on color blinded about them being recognized as such.

So, although not perfect, it made sense to me as solution to allow people being independent. I live in front of one of the metro stations, in which this code is already applied (like in many other countries, our metro rails are identified by a letter and a color).

In our hospital urgencies, we use a braced color to identify the urgency of the patient. Green, blue, yellow, IIRC.

Like real blindness, there may not be cure, but there are solutions to improve a person's life quality, even if it just helping a [color blinded] father being able to pick baby clothes for his son, not "daughter" :-)

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