A recent conversation with a fellow diver and Scubaboard member has sparked my curiosity about how
color blindness impacts all of us. Even though I have "normal" color perception, interacting with people who perceive colors differently should concern all of us. The importance of color perception is recognized in the military and is a qualifier for many jobs, including divers. I rarely see it discussed in recreational diving.
Unfortunately, according to every female in my life, being fashion-challenged appears to be independent of color perception.
Background:
Between 4 and 8% of males have some form of color vision deficiency. The numbers are 0.4-1% for females. Interestly, many people don't actually know they see colors differently. The
Ishihara Color Test is the most widely used and this link may be interesting for everyone who has not taken it.
The Test for Scubaboard:
Although I will enjoy stories on how color blindness has impacted your diving, my main objective is to get feedback on readability and differentiation of colors on Scubaboard. The feedback can be useful information in future Scubaboard upgrades and can help everyone write better threads.
Please provide feedback on these samples. Can you tell they are all different and are some especially difficult to read?
This is a reference for BLACK text, this is Bold.
This is a test for RED text, this is Bold. Color Number ff0000
This is a test for Dark RED text, this is Bold. Color Number b30000
This is a test for BLUE text, this is Bold. Color Number 0000ff
This is a test for Dark BLUE text, this is Bold. Color Number 0000b3
This is a test for GRAY text, this is Bold. Color Number 808080
Finally, are there any areas or messages on Scubaboard that you have difficulty reading? For example, red text on a light blue background. Thanks to all for your feedback.
I am severely colour blind, by which I mean I have (do not suffer!) a type of colour blindness called protanopia. It's rare even among people who are colour blind. Perhaps my perspective would be valuable to you.
Protanopia is a type of red/green deficiency. In my case I have a very hard time perceiving the colour red at all. This can lead to such difficulties as having a hard time seeing if a red traffic light is red or if it is turned off. Same goes with brake lights on cars and especially on transport trucks.
The reason transport trucks can be difficult to "read" for me is because of the large area on the back of the container. If it is decorated with any kind of advertising containing the colour red then when the brake lights come on I don't perceive a difference to how it was before that. I see the truck getting closer, which is what I respond to.
Similarly with street lights, I can see just fine if it's green. If it looks like it's turned off then it is not green and I stop. In some (rare) cases the light has indeed been turned off and I have stopped, in those cases much to the discomfort of the people behind me who didn't understand why I had stopped and expressed their discomfort with the waving of middle fingers, a little yelling and some honking of horns. Thankfully that doesn't happen often.
.... and yes, to answer your next question, I can drive but people with my type of colour blindness do apparently have more than their statistical share of accidents. I have had some accidents in my life time as well but not because of being colour blind.
The question is to put yourself in my position. What would YOU see if you looked through my eyes. It would look a lot like a broken television. If you have one of those RGB screens and you can turn off the red entirely, then you will get an idea of how someone with protanopia sees the world around them.
You will soon realize that any two colours (or shades of colours) containing any amount of red look exactly the same to me. To pick an obvious example the colours BLUE and PINK (which is blue mixed with red) look EXACTLY the same to me. In my world, there is no pink. Only blue. Like wise with the colours BLUE and PURPLE (blue mixed with red). I only see blue. So pink looks blue, purple looks blue. Other examples are obvious as well.
Finally, everything on the Red, Orange, Yellow, Green side of the spectrum looks brownish to me. Some shades of green look yellow, some shades of green look red and some shades of green look brown to me. The green on traffic lights looks white. I have a terrible time in that part of the spectrum. So basically even though the type of colour blindness I have is called a "red/green" deficiency, I'm off scale throughout easily half of the entire colour spectrum. Only clear blues are clearly identifiable to me if I know they are not a mix but I can never be sure that they are not pink or purple.
In addition there is a big difference in how I perceive the brightness of colours as compared to you. Red is the least bright colour (obviously) and in my world, blue is the brightest (most visible) colour in most situations and yellow is the brightest colour in high light situations.
It's not all bad news, however. It turns out as a fluke to this type of colour blindness that I am much more attuned to movement than peers and at night my night vision is considerably better than most people. This has advantages while diving as well. I notice this most when camping and I can see animals in the forest more easily than people whose eyes are "fooled" by the camouflage and I can often see animals moving around at night when other people only hear noises.
As an historical curiosity, I obviously inherited this deviation from my grandfather who had the same thing and was often added to forward patrols during WWII because (to hear him describe it) he could see Germans in camouflage like they were "wearing Christmas lights". That was obviously kind of handy for his unit.
This sensitivity to movement is probably a coping mechanism (compensation) for missing certain information and I think it could explain why I don't crash into transport trucks. In my experience, even though I often don't see the brake lights, I appear (the way I experience it) to be able to observe that the vehicle ahead of me is slowing down much MUCH quicker than most of the colour sighted people I've ever been in a car with and who have scared the bejezus out of me with how slowly they seem to react to traffic. Maybe this is related to having a heighten sensitivity to movement, I don't know.... Most of the time I just assume that it's because most people's brains don't process information fast enough.
So, getting to the point about text. You can really hammer it down into main lines like this:
1) anything blue looks blue for the most part. On the following sheet, the square on the bottom center and the square on the top left look very similar so I assume they are not pure blues. The others are easy to distinguish from one another when I see them together but the one on the center left is the only one I would identify as blue in isolation from the rest.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Shades_of_light_blue.png
2) Anything red looks brown. Only the intensity is different and I can't distinguish them (usually) on a computer screen. So dark grey, brown, black, any kind of red, dark orange, dark green and anything in between on that entire 1/2 of the spectrum pretty much looks identical to me. I can't identify any of these colour in isolation and have trouble even when comparing them together.
So when it comes to choosing text colours, if you want to satisfy the colour blind (and especially the severely colour blind) then you have limited choices.
YOU CAN USE BLACK. WE SEE THAT JUST FINE
YOU CAN USE YELLOW BECAUSE IT SHOWS UP WELL AND CAN'T BE CONFUSED WITH BLUE
YOU CAN USE MEDIUM GREY BECAUSE THERE IS NO COLOUR TO CONFUSE THINGS
AND YOU CAN USE BLUE BECAUSE WE CAN DISTINGUISH IT FROM THE OTHER TWO
And that's it.
incidentally, in the above example, I can read the yellow but I suspect you cannot unless it is put on a contrasting background like grey or blue. So if you want to service the entire community, you're basically stuck with black, grey and blue.
I hope that helps.
R..
