The devil's in the details

[sami]

This is quite a minor incident in and of itself, but it's symptomatic of the wider problem.

Earlier this evening I was settling down to watch a DVD with my brother-out-law, Chas. Chas was operating the remotes, and was trying to get the DVD player turned on (shooting past an obstruction, you understand), when I heard him mutter that he wasn't even sure if the screen was on.

Looking over, I saw the red light on the corner of the (LCD) TV was showing, so I said it wasn't on. He switched remotes, hit the button again, the red light turned green and the screen started warming up.

"Okay, now it's on," I said. "You can tell by whether the light in the corner is red or green."

"Wait," Chas said. "They use red and green to indicate? Those bastards!"

Despite long and close association, it took me a second to work it out - he was having a problem because he has moderate red-green colour-blindness. Really quite moderate, but he could still only sort-of tell the difference after I'd pointed it out - he hadn't been aware, really, that the light changed colour at all.

Red-green colour-blindness is relatively prevalent in the male population; in cases like this it's trivial, but the sad thing is, marking distinctions by red vs green is not at all unusual. (Fairly recently, for example, Chas was looking at diagrams of something, and had to get my help, because the diagrams coded different areas by use of red and green dots, and he had trouble telling which was which.)

It's a thoroughly invisible disability, ranging from vague annoyance to occasional danger, but it shouldn't be a disability at all. Red/green should never, ever be used to convey information merely by colour differentials.

Comments

[haunted]

I have this problem a lot, with red/green lights especially. Both my router and digital TV box have LEDs which change from red to green when active, so I can't tell, for example, if my router is properly connected to my phone line without turning on the computer. It wouldn't be so bad if the lights were in different places, but as it is I needed someone sitting with me when I set them up.

A while ago I was linked to this comparison of board/card games for normally-sighted and colour blind people. The images are a bit confusing for me, being red-green colour blind, but I'm told it's an interesting resource for other people.

A personal anecdote: I had an acquaintance who thought I literally couldn't see red or green, and thought Christmas must be a really hard time for year for me, with all the decorations being invisible.

[pne]

I had an acquaintance who thought I literally couldn't see red or green

I guess he took "colourblind" a bit too literally, eh?

[boogieshoes]

*snerks* that last para's pretty amusing.

wrt the OP:

my dad is red-green color-blind, but the primary issue he seems to have in his life is buying clothes, which he handles in (stereo)typically male fashion of passing that chore onto his wife. i've never asked about LED lights and that sort of thing; i'll have to, now.

i've often wondered what the world looked like to him as opposed to me, so one time when i was 9 or 10, i brought out a box of 36 different marker colors and identify them for me. what i learned from this was that i needed to be able to construct a better test to figure out what things looked like to him. :-p

my dad never had problems with stoplights and the like - he differentiates based on position.

just as a related comment, the US military won't allow you into the pilot corps if you're color blind because the cockpit lights usually don't have labels on them. (cockpit real estate is at a premium.)

-bs

[treeowl]

If the problem happens frequently, you might consider investing in a red filter and a green filter. High quality will run you $10-$30 at the camera store. Cellophane will run you less at wherever you buy colored cellophane for gift wrap.