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Color blindness

commandcenter.blogspot.com

111–120 of 165 posts

Re: Color blindness

#111

Not colorblind (my father was) but I appreciated his brief “old eyes” discussion at the end. I’m 42 and have been using a computer since I was 6. Now I’m both nearsighted (since I was 8) and farsighted (since my late 30s), which means I can’t read without glasses of some kind. Similarly, “light mode” is far easier to use and more legible than “dark mode” despite the recent trendiness of the latter. I can also back up…

The research I'm aware of has shown that light backgrounds help people with astigmatism because they cause constriction of the pupils to adapt to the increased light coming in given low ambient light, which brings things into sharper focus for those with astigmatism.

Of course not constricting the pupils is a major reason people like dark mode, and mobile devices have greatly increased the use of screens in environments with low ambient light. I suspect the only good solution is to support both light and dark modes universally.

Re: Color blindness

#112
post #8

I'm r/g colorblind, and suddenly the indistinguishability of small colored objects makes sense now. Wow. Okay then. I hate multicolor LEDs with a passion. Those little amber or green dots look identical to me, even when you put them side by side. I use a phone app that uses the camera and shows me RGB values at a reticule. I've gone through rack and racks of equipment with that app, looking for things like dead drive…

That's a big reason for the order of lights in traffic lights. New lights, around here, are also getting reflective frames, so that people can better understand the position of the active light. https://pxhere.com/en/photo/265717

It's briefly confusing if you have only lived in places with vertical traffic lights, and then move to someplace that has horizontal traffic lights, and vice versa.

Re: Color blindness

#113
post #59

"Another consequence of all this is that I see very little color in the stars. That makes me sad." WTF, Am I color blind too? I pass regular color blindness tests with ease, but I have never seen any color in the stars. Not with the naked eye at least.

With the naked eye, stars can be seen to have subtly-different colors. Other commenters have pointed out that Mars is rather distinctly orange/red, and easily visible in the skies of North America now.

One example between stars right now is the two brightest stars in the constellation Orion. Where I am, in Indiana, USA, Orion rises around midnight EDT (~0400 UTC) tonight. It will rise earlier is you are east of me, and will rise earlier as we get into northern-hemisphere winter.

Betelgeuse (pronounced like the movie "Beetlejuice", but with "bay" instead of "bee") is Orion's right shoulder. Since he is facing towards us, it is the star in the top-left of the constellation. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, so it is both distinctly bright and distinctly red when compared to the other stars in Orion.

The star I like to compare Betelgeuse to is Rigel, Orion's left knee (bottom-right from our point of view).Rigel is a blue supergiant, similarly bright to Betelgeuse.

Here's an excellent color-enhanced mosaic image of the constellation by Rogelio Bernal Andreo, which clearly shows the red-orange-ness of Betelgeuse compared to the other stars in the constellation:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Orion_He...

More information about the image can be found here:

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap101023.html

To the naked eye, I (and other typically-sighted people) can distinguish these colors easily when looking for them. Their color ranges from red/orange to white to sort of sky-blue. This is because starlight is black-body radiation, which creates a very specific scale of colors. Here is an image showing the typical colors of stars, and their corresponding surface temperatures:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation#/media/Fi...

Rest assured that to me, at a glance, stars are just bright white dots. Even knowing that the colors are there, I still have to stop for a second and look at them in order to see it.

Re: Color blindness

#114
post #27

I've got mild red-green colorblindness (less severe than the author's); this article is great, and goes into much more detail than I knew beforehand. If I could add some suggestions to the author's at the end: * First, if you have the option of using one or the other, do so. Like, you can use red, blue, yellow, purple, and black for lines on a graph before you even need to find an additional color like green. * Secon…

To add to your suggestions: avoid referring to colors on a chart by name. While it may be able to identify the difference between two colors (e.g. by intensity), it may not be possible to identify the color. In my case, identifying blue and purple are frequently difficult. Presumably this is because purple is a mixture of blue and red.

Re: Color blindness

#115
post #7

I didn't know he was color blind. I can't help but connect this to his famous disdain for syntax highlighting and colored text: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...

As someone who's similarly red-green colorblind, I'd say it's far more likely to be related to the amount of time he's spent reading and writing code on monochrome displays, perhaps coupled with market trends that tended to associate color with cheap/mainstream/gaming hardware vs. monochrome with expensive/professional/engineering hardware. For several reasons, there was a major trade-off between color and contrast/s…

I don’t think that’s it. I used syntax highlighting for nearly 20 years then stopped a decade ago and don’t miss it at all. So I had every reason to want to use it but now I don’t even want it.

Re: Color blindness

#116
post #66
post #8

I'm r/g colorblind, and suddenly the indistinguishability of small colored objects makes sense now. Wow. Okay then. I hate multicolor LEDs with a passion. Those little amber or green dots look identical to me, even when you put them side by side. I use a phone app that uses the camera and shows me RGB values at a reticule. I've gone through rack and racks of equipment with that app, looking for things like dead drive…

I'm also Red-green colourblind, and also use a mobile app to check RGB values of things! I also use a Windows traybar app that I wrote with Delphi about 15 years ago, which gives me a dropper I can use anywhere in the screen to see RGB values. I've also noticed that it's much more difficult to differentiate tones and colours of small objects. Cues were mentioned in the article, and I think I subconsciously rely on th…

May I ask what apps are both of you using?

Re: Color blindness

#117
post #64
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I still see the colors of stars, but it's like a pale color. They are mostly white, but some tend toward red, others yellow, others blue. There's definitely a difference. When I see Mars, it is definitely more red, especially so when it is closer. But I distinctly remember my young eyes, probably when I was 4, that the the stars had a lot more color than they do now. I remember talking about it with my mother wh…

Are you by any chance one of the (described in the article) tetrachromates?

Not possible. Tetrachromates have to have two X chromosomes, which means that almost all tetrachromates are women. In rare cases, a man can have two X chromosomes, but I'm definitely one of them.

Re: Color blindness

#118
post #8

I'm r/g colorblind, and suddenly the indistinguishability of small colored objects makes sense now. Wow. Okay then. I hate multicolor LEDs with a passion. Those little amber or green dots look identical to me, even when you put them side by side. I use a phone app that uses the camera and shows me RGB values at a reticule. I've gone through rack and racks of equipment with that app, looking for things like dead drive…

That's a big reason for the order of lights in traffic lights. New lights, around here, are also getting reflective frames, so that people can better understand the position of the active light. https://pxhere.com/en/photo/265717

In Michigan traffic lights are painted yellow, which works well for me at night. In California traffic lights are painted black, which means at night I cannot distinguish red and yellow lights. Although some traffic lights are now getting a reflective strip around the outside, which is the best.

Re: Color blindness

#119
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was flashing a router which seemed broken. Each flashing was failing. Then my brother came by and asked me if I was trying to trigger a failed flash? WTF? As you now guessed I was seeing these little motherfucker LEDs as red when they were green. I hate them with passion. And I work in IT, they are everywhere. I sent a few days ago a picture of my home fibre converter to my wife when she was out with friends so tha…

Do you reckon AR glasses fix this issue?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted.

This was my first thought. The posts above mention using an app to read RGB. An overlay using AR would bring immediate value, I would think.

My colorblindness is mild. Can tell most colors but fail the petri dish color test around round 3-4, nothing pops out at me.

Re: Color blindness

#120
post #9

Great article. Ummm... dumb question, but... stars are colored? (Color blind poster here).

Somewhat unrelated story, but I used to be in astronomy and two friends of mine were once on an observing run together. Observing can sometimes be a bit dull and as you're getting night shifted it's hard to do anything productive while you're waiting for the exposures to finish. So you're looking for ways to pass the time. Anyway, somehow my two friends started looking at color blindness tests. One of them had grown…

Probably not that severe.
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