Dear friends of Colblindor,

I just introduced a new forum on Colblindor about—of course—color blindness. I did a basic set up of the forum with some of the main topics about color vision deficiency to get started with it.

As I get contacted on a daily basis by people from all around the world and as Colblindor gathers already more than 2’000 comments on this topic, I thought it’s about time to get another possibility to communicate, exchange ideas and thoughts, and ask questions in the color blindness community.

Reading through all those emails shows me, that many people are looking for specific information on a certain topic or are willing to share their personal story, thoughts, or ideas. The color blindness forum shall help all those people—doesn’t matter if colorblind themselves or not—to get a central entrance point.

I would really love to see if this new forum would grow into another great information source about color blindness. So please, dear friends and readers of Colblindor, get it started with your personal questions, topics, stories and more.

Thanks so much,
Daniel from Colblindor

Coloblindor — Color Blindness Forum now activated!

World of Warcraft is one of the most played games around the world. Blizzard, the company behind the game, will introduce with the next patch (3.1) a module for disabled people. This includes a part for enhancing the interface for colorblind people. Some objects, which were traditionally color coded, can now be assigned to letters or symbols.

The people from AbleGamers, a community for disabled gamers, interviewed a lead developer from Blizzard, Tom Chilton. They wanted to learn more about this new colorblind option.

Here is a list of enhancements for colorblind WoW gamers. The listed features either support an already existing color coding or replace it.

• Tags distinguish friendly, neutral, or hostile creatures and enemies.
• Gear quality has additional text descriptions.
• The three different coin types are labeled with single letters.
• Recommended character level is listed as a number.
• Learned recipes will be rated from + through to +++.

This sounds like quite a big step forward. As a colorblind less than part time gamer I am very happy about every little enhancement in the games I play. Almost never I can see the difference between color coded stuff in the first moment. So I either will learn it during the gameplay or just never really know what I am doing.

In the case of such a big game like World of Warcraft, there are obviously many more possibilities to enhance it for gamers suffering from color blindness. Here is one more example, taken from the same article:

Additionally, some things were overlooked in Blizzard’s version of this add-on. Rogues accumulate combo points as they attack their victims. These combo points are shown as red dots in an arc around the picture of the rogue’s target. As the points are accumulated, the red dots are filled in.

Someone who was colorblind to the color red would not be able to tell the difference between a red dot filled in with red and a red dot lightly shaded with red. One member of the player base identified this problem and created a specific add-on called Kast Combo Points that would change the way the points are displayed. This modification changed the red dots so that they are completely hidden until a combo point is awarded.

Dear colorblind gamer, I’m sure you will and already found your personal way to play the games you like. And if color blindness gets to much into your way, just play another game. Don’t forget, it’s just a game.

Occupational Health & Safety is the industry-leading news magazine, eNewsletter, and website for occupational health and safety professionals. The February issue 2009 will feature the topic “Vision Testing: A Blind Spot In Occupational Safety”, including web links to Colblindor, as a resource about color blindness.

What is the article all about?

The author claims, that vision is often not checked regularly if you compare it to hearing or blood pressure. And this causes that many employees are short sighted, have no depth perception, are night blind, or are suffering from color vision deficiency—unrecognized from their employers—whereas this handicaps can be real safety problems.

As an employer you should ask yourself:

• When did your employees have the last vision check?
• Is some aspect of vision crucial for their job?
• Should you introduce some vision tests in the recruitment process?

I can’t judge all aspects of the article. But I can judge the part about color vision, which is unfortunately not very well researched. All they say is that color blindness could be a problem for drivers because of the traffic lights. I think this is a bit to superficial. You can find my opinion on this topic at: Colorblind at the Traffic Light.

Anyway, thanks for linking me up.

The RGB Anomaloscope can be used to check if you are suffering from red-green color blindness or not. Unfortunately it is not possible to differentiate between the different forms of red-green color vision deficiency.

Our online anomaloscope is based on matches between yellow and a mixture of red and green—like the real anomaloscope. The matches you make can tell you, if you are suffering from red-green color blindness or not (because if you are not colorblind, you can’t make any matches).

In an earlier update of the anomaloscope (Severity Upgrade), I found an interesting looking pattern in the matching colors. We had two peaks which looked like a pattern for differentiating between red- and green-blindness.

• Red-blindness shifts the peak of red sensitive cones towards the peak of the green ones. Because of that you have problems in differentiating certain colors and also your red starts looking much darker.
• Green-blindness works the other way around. The peak of the green sensitive cones is shifted towards the red peak. This causes a very similar form of color blindness, but in contrast to red-blindness, red doesn’t start to look darker.

Over the last month I tried to evaluate this pattern in further detail while asking testers to declare their type of color vision deficiency, if known. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any pattern at all.

This diagram shows the number of people taking the test, which declared to be green-blind and matched a certain yellow value (horizontal axis) to either green (#00FE00) or red (#FF8000).

The above diagram can’t tell us anything about a pattern. We have to compare it to the diagram, which is based on the numbers from people who declared to be red-blind.

I adjusted the vertical axis in this diagram, as there were more people who declared to be red-blind. So the two diagrams can be compared 1 : 1.

Unfortunately the two diagrams Greenblind and Redblind look pretty much the same. This shows me, that my first assumption was wrong and this version of the RGB anomaloscope can not differentiate between red and green color vision deficiency.

Summize is a reviewing tool which is solely based on user reviews. Reviews are split by colors: starting with red for a bad review and going towards green for a great review. Sounds like the designers have never heard of red-green color blindness. After many user comments on this, they introduced Snips for the Color Blind (found through Summize has options for color-deficient people).