Is there anyone Colour-blind?

[redhed17]

I've had a new Smart TV for a few months and so have been watching lots of Youtube videos. Every so often something interesting gets recommended. Yesterday a video popped up with a title like 'Colour-blind person sees Colour for the first time'. I was intrigued. I'd never heard anything like it before, I thought colour-blind, then that's it! Apparently there are glasses available that enables some colour-blind people (about 80%) to see colours. The glasses are called Enchroma Glasses. They are not cheap glasses, but watching some of the reactions of people seeing colours for the first time are quite emotional, and I'm sure a lot of the people will say they were worth it.

If anyone colour-blind has never heard of these glasses then it may be something to, excuse the pun, look into. It doesn't work for about 20% of people, and I haven't looked into which types of colour deficiencies they can help, but like I say some of the videos, boom! it's that big a change some people.

There was even a video of an artist seeing his paintings in colour for the first time and seeing details which he never knew where there, which was weird and interesting.

As an aside, I have a friend who is colour-blind who I'm interested to see how interested he is in this. When we left school he went on training course to become an Electrician and it was only 6 months in that they realised he was colour-blind (he didn't know) and so 6 months wasted. Not a good idea to not be able to differentiate the colours of some wires if you're an Electrician apparently. Funny now, but not so much at the time.

 

[dom71]

I'm colour-blind. Technically, deuteranomoly or low green but oddly, I love the colour green and think I see it quite well. I've seen the Enchroma videos and am seriously tempted, but a bit put off by the high cost. I don't mind spending the money if it transforms vision for me, as some videos suggest - but I'm wary of spending a lot of cash to find it makes no difference. They seem to work by attenuating other colour wavelengths, to bring things back into better balance. Logically, to my mind, I presume that must mean they also make vision darker overall.

I missed out on my first choice of career as a helicopter pilot because of my vision issues, but, ironically, trained as an electronic engineer and faced the same issues as your friend. Contrary to what people envisage, you still see the same colours as people with normal vision - you just "understand" them differently, a bit like dyslexia. You can quite quickly retrain yourself to understand what certain colours are if you have to.

 

[redhed17]

I've seen the Enchroma videos and am seriously tempted, but a bit put off by the high cost. I don't mind spending the money if it transforms vision for me, as some videos suggest - but I'm wary of spending a lot of cash to find it makes no difference. They seem to work by attenuating other colour wavelengths, to bring things back into better balance. Logically, to my mind, I presume that must mean they also make vision darker overall.

Would it not be possible to try and find someone to try their glasses to see if it had a desired affect?

I missed out on my first choice of career as a helicopter pilot because of my vision issues, but, ironically, trained as an electronic engineer and faced the same issues as your friend. Contrary to what people envisage, you still see the same colours as people with normal vision - you just "understand" them differently, a bit like dyslexia. You can quite quickly retrain yourself to understand what certain colours are if you have to.

I've never really gone into detail with my mate as to what he sees colours wise. There is a site online test many years ago which checks how you see colours, which I can't find now, which he wasn't keen to try.

Other than the incident in the 80's on the training course I don't think it has affected him too much, at least he hasn't mentioned it. He got into Photography for awhile and there were the occasional odd looking image. He's since got into video and again, occasionally something doesn't look quite right to me.

 

[dom71]

Would it not be possible to try and find someone to try their glasses to see if it had a desired affect?

Hopefully, if they work as claimed, we might start to see them being offered by opticians here in the UK particularly as something like 9% of men are supposed to be colourblind. Seems as though there are just a few trickling into the UK via sites like Amazon and eBay at the moment, so hard to get my hands on some to try.