14 ms·
Color blindness
- 7kmph 6y agoI once got married just to know whether my battery pack is charging or not.
- stickfigure 6y agoUsing capitalization to distinguish public/private was still a terrible idea.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ksaj 6y agoI'm yellow/blue blind in my dominant eye. This article rings true for me, although with different colour choices. For example, I didn't realize the halo thing was common, but I see it when looking at bright pink things. The larger an object is, the more likely I can tell from that eye alone what colour it is. Mostly I err on the side of cyan - any colour near cyan (green to light blue) will invariably look like a single shade of cyan to that eye, so those colours are pretty much indistinguishable if overlapping like in the text examples. Eg: At night, the blue lights on buses and the green "go" light at intersections are the same colour to that eye - cyan. Until they get close (large) enough and then I can tell that they are different colours. There is a huge difference when I do A/B comparison in either case, but when looking through both eyes simultaneously, I don't notice the deficiency at all. The brain decodes colour and fills in the blanks in unusual ways.
- gravypod 6y agoThis is such a detailed description of the issues caused by red/green color blindness. I've had some issues in the past specifically related to small red and green boxes. When you do some operations work you'll eventually run into a chart like this [0] and, during an outage, you'll undoubtedly not be able to notice a scattering of small red boxes in this type of visualization. Similar with line charts. Telling the difference between 2 lines on a graph that are not thick is difficult especially now that people have migrated to higher DPI displays. [0] - http://status.ovh.com/vms/index_bhs1.html http://status.ovh.com/vms/index_bhs1.html
- BrandoElFollito 6y agoI am colorblind. Just to be sure, there are no non-green boxes in the chart you linked to, right?
- DanBC 6y agoAll the boxes are green, apart from the key which is bright blue, bright yellow, dark yellow, orange, red, and maroon.
- BrandoElFollito 6y agoThanks, I got a bit worried :)
- gravypod 6y agoTo be honest, if the boxes were smaller, I couldn't definitively say as I'm also red-green color blind. So I'm glad someone could clear it up for us. One great example of the case where I absolutely cannot tell is when you have a LOT of tests in something like buildkite https://buildkite.com/features https://buildkite.com/features and most API status pages (many small green/yello/red circles/boxes).
- vanderZwan 6y ago> It has to do with edge detection. The signals from receptors in the eye are used not only to detect color, but also to detect edges. In fact since color is detected largely by differences of spectral response from nearby receptors, the edges are important because that's where the strongest difference lies. The color of a region, especially a small one, is largely determined at the edges. Aha! So that is why I have the hardest time with line charts even when I distinguish the colors in the legend just fine!
- catern 6y agoI 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/kG3BHV6QFfIJ https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...
- kabdib 6y agoI usually ignore syntax highlighting. I can't see it well because it's tiny, and because the "designers" usually chose colors that are tough to distinguish, and sometimes very difficult to see at all. For instance, the default console colors in Ubuntu are TERRIBLE (maybe for everyone). The output of 'ls' uses blue letters on a black background for some type of file, and I literally cannot see those. Ditto for some errors in Emacs (e.g., trying to exit w/o saving a file). That output is invisible. If you are an engineer and decide to do something with color in your UI, please get some designer help and listen.
- slaymaker1907 6y agoI wrote a small DSL editor before and I had to fight extremely hard to get a theme that made the semantic highlighting legible. I like pretty things too, but they also need to be functional.
- franga2000 6y agoMy vision is very good and I can confirm, the default Ubuntu terminal colors are horrible.
- dharmab 6y agoAs a color blind engineer, I love syntax highlighting, but mostly for the "pop" and "fade" contrast effects rather than associating specific colors with semantic values.
- GordonS 6y agoI'm red-green colourblind (quite badly), and also use syntax highlighting for the same reasons - it highlights semantically different parts of the syntax (or not, as wanted) even though I have no idea what the colours actually are.
- kabdib 6y agoI'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 drives and errored-out ports. Back in the 80s, I borrowed the eyes of cow-orkers (with the cow-orker still attached). My wife was a PM on a project once, and asked what I thought of a bit of UI. The designers had replaced a set of small status icons with colored dots (green=ok, red=bad, puce=alerting, etc.). I explained that I could not distinguish them. They didn't believe me; it took that team about five months to come up with a UI that made sense (the same icons, but with colored, duh).
- krzyk 6y ago> I use a phone app that uses the camera and shows me RGB values at a reticule. Could you share the app name? It would make my life a bit easier (I hate those red/amber/green leds that look identical) :)
- kabdib 6y agoOn iOS, it's "Color Blind Pal".
- gilbetron 6y agoOn Android, there's "Color Blind Pal" that I use, doesn't use RGB values, but gives you names for the colors instead.
- gen3 6y agoI’ve been happy using Cone on iOS after seeing it get brought up on HN previously. It’s paid, but it was worth it to me.
- GordonS 6y agoI use Color Blind Pal on Android. Been using it for a few years. If you get it, I'd recommend going into the settings and increasing the sample size - it defaults to "small", which given the way it flickers I'd guess means "1 pixel" :) I use it on the "large" setting, and it works great.
- wglass 6y agoGreat article. Ummm... dumb question, but... stars are colored? (Color blind poster here).
- grzm 6y agoYup. > "The color of a star, as determined by the most intense frequency of the visible light, depends on the temperature of the star's outer layers, including its photosphere." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star#Radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star#Radiation
- endogui 6y agoThe poster's question should be interpreted as: can the color of the stars be distinguished with the naked eye?
- grzm 6y agoAgain, yes. Particularly in clusters, I can detect differences in the colors of stars.
- tmp538394722 6y agoWow - sounds like you have more sensitive than average color perception. Do you think you might be a tetrachromat?
- grzm 6y agoNope. It probably helps to live away from cities and such, in that there's a lot of stars visible at night. And it's not like looking at a rainbow: they're tints, not intense color differences. 'endogui linked to an article that talks about this: I don't think it's all that unusual. https://earthsky.org/?p=2875 https://earthsky.org/?p=2875
- emddudley 6y agoI am not color blind and I've never noticed star colors. They just look white or yellow to me. It must be very subtle.
- drenvuk 6y agoI've been wondering if syntax highlighting has a different amount of usefulness for colorblind people and whether it would be worth it to have a "font highlighting" system for different things. I already use bold for curly braces and italics for square braces since I use a small font. I'd like to try it. But vim chokes if the fonts are different sizes and sublime only allows one font at a time.
- hirundo 6y agoI watched a youtube video where a color blind guy in his 50s was given a pair of EnChroma glasses for color blindness, put them on, and had a strong emotional reaction, like a deaf person hearing for the first time. Then I read the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EnChroma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EnChroma) that says "they do not restore normal color vision, and claims in excess of this by the manufacturer have been characterized as marketing hype ... They are simply a very expensive pair of hunting glasses ... How could they possibly work? The answer is that they can't." I liked the video and now my feed has dozens of similar ones with similar strong reactions. If they don't work why the reactions? Am I missing the videos where they just say "meh"? Is it a placebo effect or maybe they're just playing it up for the gift givers? I guess the test is whether they continue to wear the glasses for long.
- achenatx 6y agoIm red green colorblind and have enchroma glasses. They work by reducing the other colors to balance with the reduced colors. There are lots of reddish brown things that are actually red. I wear mine daily, but if I didnt, I wouldnt miss them. With the glasses on I can see subtle red tints that I cant normally notice. For whatever reason it doesnt help much with green.
- n3k5 6y agoYou might want to spend a few more minutes on finding out what those actually do. Yes, of course they don't restore normal colour vision. They can't possibly work iff that's the goal. Look at the frequency responses of cone cells in a human with normal colour vision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision#/media/File:Cone-fundamentals-with-srgb-spectrum.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision#/media/File:Cone-... Those already have a very high overlap. A lot of people with red-green colour blindness still have those two types of cones working quite well individually, but the overlap is even more extreme. What these glasses do is filter out photons that fall in these overlapping regions. This amplifies the difference in responses from different cone cells. I don't know about what marketing claims were made by that particular company. Maybe some were plain wrong; maybe they were correct but overhyped with a tendency to mislead. Maybe some of those YT videos aren't as ‘organic’ as they seem, but dramatic reenactments incentivised by some PR douche handing out free samples. All I know is that it's not implausible that someone is happy because they can finally tell grey from purple for the first time. I'd encourage interested consumers to check out other brands first, but no idea if those even exist in the consumer eyewear market. Maybe Enchroma are sitting on a patent? Anyway, try before you buy. By the way, I would have been surprised if that Wikipedia article actually said ‘they can't possibly work‘. That's not the case — it contains a quote with that claim. It's cool to shorten a quotation to just the relevant parts, but please try to not invent ‘alternative facts‘ in the process. > like a deaf person hearing for the first time Yeah, definitely not. Once upon a time, my headphones and earphones failed simultaneously and I spent a couple of weeks listening to podcasts through busted earbuds, in shit quality, mostly one ear at a time. Then I got proper IEMs and finally could hear music again. In stereo. Experience all the instruments. That felt quite good. I guess it's more like that. Except it would be for the first time ever. I can see how that would prompt an emotional response.
- krzyk 6y agoI have also red-green color blindness and it makes me really mad that a lot (like 90%) devices have a tiny LED that indicates if it is charged and the LED changes color from red to green when it is fully charged - I have to ask my kid or wife what color it is. Please please, if you work in hardware, make it a red/blue or green/blue colors for empty/fully charged, or make it blink, anything, just not tiny 1 pixel size red or green color (or amber/yellow, they are equally hard to distinguish for people like me from green).
- sergeykish 6y agoTurn off light when charged, works for Panasonic batteries charger.
- quesera 6y agoUnfortunately the light also turns off when the charger is broken, or unplugged.
- titanomachy 6y agoNice article. Small correction, humans are not old world monkeys (or any kind of monkey). We are apes.
- krzyk 6y agoInteresting, so English language has two words for them. e.g. in Polish both are "małpa" (and usually translated to monkey), similar to turtle and tortoise, for us it is a single world "żółw" (and usually translated to turtle).
- garaetjjte 6y agoApe could be also translated as "człekokształtne" ("humanoids"?)
- titanomachy 6y agoIt's partly an issue of language, but "old world monkey" and "ape" correspond to specific scientific classifications as well.
- loeg 6y agoI'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. * Second, highly saturated ("computer" red/green) are easy to distinguish (for me, anyway, and it sounds like the author as well). So they're preferable to less saturated versions of red and green, if you need to use both. For me, the most difficult reds and greens to distinguish are in the pastel range. * Additionally, if you're designing UI for a program (game or whatever) with colorblindness options, PLEASE do not label the options with the medical names only ("deuteranopia", "protanopia", "tritanopia"). I don't know what the latin word for the medical condition of red-green colorblind is, I just know I have the relatively common kind of red-green colorblindness. I'd guess most people who aren't doctors are in a similar boat. Labels that include the color-distinction difficulty and relative commonality would be most useful to me, e.g., "red-green (MOST COMMON — deuteranopia)", "red-green (LESS COMMON — protanopia)", and "blue-yellow (EXTREMELY RARE — tritanopia)".
- noneeeed 6y agoHow about this for selecting. Colour scheme: just display a colourblind was test and ask the user to select the one they can or can't read. Then you don't have to rely on them knowing what the different types are at all.
- loeg 6y agoYeah, that seems pretty reasonable to me!
- II2II 6y agoTo 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.
- kerng 6y agoThis article is high quality - learned a lot by reading.
- Wistar 6y agoR/G colorblind here. This is simply the best writing about my color vision deficit I have ever read. The charge status LED thing makes me crazy and I now wonder if I could use diffusion/ground glass or film over the LED with a little gap to, in effect, enlarge the color field of an LED so that I can better discern the color.
- antognini 6y agoI'm red-green colorblind but the only way it noticeably affects my life these days is with the icons on Github's notifications page. A merged PR an an open PR have different shapes and the merged PR is blue and the open PR is green --- very easy to distinguish. But an open PR and a closed PR have identical shapes and are only distinguished by the open PR being green and the closed PR being red. Or so I'm told anyway, because I cannot for the life of me distinguish between the two. I end up needing to just open the link to the PR to check its status.
- skrebbel 6y agoThe closed PR icon has a tiny little tickmark in the icon I believe. I had never realized they had different colors btw, and always wondered why GitHub wouldn't give them different colors. Thanks for clarifying that they actually did, just badly. Tip for anyone using red and green for statuses: do like traffic lights: make the green a whiteish, blueish green and make the red tend a bit towards orange. And for the love of god use wildly different icon shapes!
- mcint 6y agoMade an issue based on your comment. Is this accurate? http://github.com/github/view_component/issues/495 http://github.com/github/view_component/issues/495
- antognini 6y agoI didn't know you could do that! Thanks!
- jedberg 6y agoI had a woodshop/electronics shop teacher in high school with severe red/green blindness. He said at stop lights the only reason he knew which was green and which was red was because of the layout. But when he went to states with sideways lights, he'd just wait until the people behind him honked until he figured out which was red and which was green. But as an electronics teacher, it was extra problematic, because resistors are labeled by color bands. So he would constantly quiz us on that by randomly asking us what the resistance was, because he needed to know for his own projects! He also said a lot of warning labels on woodshop equipment was bad because they depended on being able to tell the difference between R and G. I learned very early in life that any UI that uses red and green as a differentiator is bad.
- bluGill 6y agoI remember driving one night alone in a rural area with sideways stoplights. I didn't realize it until one turned red on me, until then I just saw a weird light ahead. At least red is clear to me so I would stop.
- ericbarrett 6y agoNot 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 his exhortation to not use the thinnest possible lines for text. 4K monitors have been a blessing, not directly (though they sure are nice) but because they’ve brought good fonts and UI scaling into the general use case.
- Zak 6y agoThe 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.
- OscarCunningham 6y ago> That is a worthwhile endeavor, and the people writing them mean well, but I suspect very few of them are color-blind because the advice is often poor and sometimes wrong. The most common variety of color blindness is called red-green color blindness, or deuteranopia, and it affects about 6% of human males. This is frustrating. He's trying to correct misconceptions and then he immediately gets the word wrong. What he's describing is 'deuteranomaly'. The term 'deuteranopia' applies to the more severe form of colourblindness shown in his diagram (a); it's a form of true dichromacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Classification
- ajuc 6y agoI also have this ind of slight red-green color blindness. It doesn't bother me in practice except for a few unimportant edge cases. One of them is color maps. I wish people just used brightness maps instead, there's no value added by changing brightness gradient into a hue gradient. The worst by far are multi-hue gradients.
- garaetjjte 6y ago> I can drive a car and I stop when the light is red and go when the light is green. I'm also slightly colorblind and pure green light would be harder to distinguish from distance (not critical because there is also light position, but still). That's why traffic lights usually have cyan tint.
- anikan_vader 6y ago>> Maybe I can help you understand how that impairment—and it is an impairment, however mild... This is actually a slightly controversial claim. While r/g color-blind individuals do have difficulty viewing colors, they seem to have an easier time seeing through camouflage: A study on the ability to distinguish tones of khaki: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/in-combat-stick-with-the-color-blind https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/in-combat-stick-with-t... There is strong anecdotal evidence that color-blind men specifically recruited during the world wars to see camouflage: (I have personally heard such an anecdote). https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a32spn/colorblind_recruited_in_ww2_to_see_camouflage/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a32spn/color... And a short YouTube video on the ability of color-blind monkeys to forage for insects, whereas the monkeys with color-vision are better able to find ripe red fruit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NrmH039ffI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NrmH039ffI I suspect that if we lived in a world where the color-blind were the majority, it would be those with color-vision who wrote about their 'impairment'. Perhaps with a note about how video games often contain almost-impossible tasks to discern camouflage. (In the real world, video games often contain tasks that require the ability to discern colors that I find difficult due to my r/g colorblindness).
- jjeaff 6y agoWell sure. I would also assume that if we lived in a world where most people were wheelchair bound, people not in a wheelchair would be at a disadvantage.
- watwut 6y agoWell, there used to be jokes about stupid women seeing non existent color differences and making big deal about them. As in women being crazy and their husbands rational having to deal with that. Meanwhile, color blindness in overwhelmingly make issue.
- cuspycode 6y agoYou don't have to invoke color-blindness or tetrachromacy to explain that. Even normal trichromatic people will have differences of opinion about shades of blue or green. But every difference of opinion that might involve gender will always be exaggerated.
- garaetjjte 6y agoInteresting thing about people with deuteranomaly, is that in some situations we can utilize luminance and S-cone data better than most people with normal vision. That's how Ishihara hidden plates work (numbers that are visible only with color vision deficiency). But some normal trichromats can also read these hidden plates: https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2135713 https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2135713
- sergeykish 6y agoThat's not how I read it. Normal trichromats see noise on L/(L+M) axis, for red-green color vision defective that axis is L/(L+L). We use S/(L+M) axis and luminance differences. Some normal trichromats can see through that noise. To understand how it feels lets compare with a superior vision of birds [1]. "That bird is mostly black", I see what it does not see. With normal vision colors pop out. I've checked once emulation, animal tongue is so red (displayed as hot pink), the brightest point on the picture. Meanwhile it is "just red" for me. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+bird+see&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=how+bird+see&tbm=isch
- djaychela 6y agoThere have been plenty of times where I (r/g colourblind) have been able to see paint mis-matches on red coloured cars where people with normal vision haven't seen an issue, and I've been able to tell at a distance which panel has been refinished. I think the input/output curve of my red perception is non-linear compared to normal colour vision, and while on a lot of that scale it is a deficiency, in some situations, I have improved sensitivity. Having said that, I'd trade in a heartbeat, so I could see bloody charging LEDs properly.
- loxs 6y ago"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.
- avhon1 6y agoWith 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_Head_to_Toe.jpg 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 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/File:Color_temperature_black_body_800-12200K.svg 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.
- bump-ladel 6y agoI wrote an app that aimed to simulate vision impairments, including types of colour blindness. The idea is that the designer or developer can point their iPhone/iPad at design to get some idea of what it might be like for someone else to view it. https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/vision-impairment-simulator/id1438417311 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/vision-impairment-simulator/id...
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoGood to consider everyone when designing interfaces. As for degrees, I had a Cub Scout making a craft project. He held up a pipe cleaner and asked "Is this green?" It was black. Jet black. I said "No, its black". Oh. He selected another (green) one and all was well. So it can be complicated for some.
- mcint 6y agoIs there a more precisely evocative term? color-disability, color indistinguishment. Color vision-impaired? Vision/visual-color impaired. Impaired color perception. The word "blind" implies, at a first impression, nothing to be done for a visual use-case.
- sigwinch28 6y agoColour (vision) deficiency.
- lb1lf 6y agoBeing tritanope, my favourite euphemism is 'chromatographically challenged'.
- forgotmypw17 6y agowant to piggyback onto this thread and request someone to help me test my ui. link and creds is in my profile. you can leave feedback here or right on the site.
- Saint_Genet 6y agoI have fairly severe deuteranomaly, and boy are the default label colors in Jira hard to see.
- leto_ii 6y ago> In short, color detection when looking at small things, deciding what color an item is when it's so small that only the color difference signal at the edges can make the determination, is worse for color-blind people. Even though the colors are easy to distinguish for large objects, it's hard when they get small. Like the author of the article I am partially red-green colorblind. I found it particularly Illuminating to understand why the amount of colour makes a difference in the ability to distinguish between them. It's someting that I have repeatedly observed on my own, but I could never properly explain.
- jbay808 6y agoThis article was a fascinating and informative read for me. The author (who I assume is male, I don't remember if he said so outright) kept repeating how colour is perceived based on the difference between receptor signals. I had learned that already so I kept thinking, "yeah yeah, I know"... ... Then he got to the point about edge detection, and suddenly I understood! I never thought before about how the difference is calculated between receptors that are not precisely co-located on the retina. Of course! Seems obvious in retrospect but I never thought about it. That also makes many colour-optical illusions make more sense. If the author comes across these comments -- I have full colour vision and unusually good eyesight. Even for me, without magnification the stars are not colourful. Mars is slightly red, Betelgeuse is very slightly red, the milky way has a slightly bluish tinge, but for the most part, the stars are just white points. They do sometimes shimmer / twinkle briefly between different colours in a way that can make it really hard to say what exact colour they are, even if I stare at them. You probably notice that too, though. So I don't think your experience of the stars is likely to be that different, and you shouldn't feel sad!
- RabbitmqGuy 6y agoThe author is Rob Pike; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike
- MereInterest 6y agoNon-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike
- tolien 6y ago> I see red and green just fine. Maybe not as fine as you do, but just fine. I get by. I can drive a car and I stop when the light is red and go when the light is green. Yup. If I had a pound for every time someone would hear I'm R/G colourblind, hold up something red and go "so what colour is this then?".
- 7kmph 6y agoI'm r/g colorblind, the biggest takeaway from this article is that, there are different colors in the stars??
- woliveirajr 6y agoOne friend once told me that he would see 100% red down to 70% red as the same thing. So after certain point, the intensity of red didn't matter. Summer studies show that colorblind person don't get fooled by camuflage. Anedoctaly, another friend got a LCD tv with a red dot in the middle of the screen. He sold the tv to the first friend because he had no problem with that dot...
- slim 6y agoI see very little color in the stars I can't see any color in the stars either. All of them are white. Are you people seeing colored stars ?
- yongjik 6y agoI'm not colorblind, but the only colored star I remember seeing is Betelgeuse - it's bright and easy to find. Mars is also usually reddish but it keeps moving, so it's harder to find (for me) - also it's not a star. I think seeing the color of stars is more a question of how dark your night sky is, and how many stars you recognize.
- tomduncalf 6y agoThis was a great read. I am red/green colourblind and it was fascinating to learn about how edge detection plays a key role - I’ve always thought it was interesting how I struggle to tell colours apart on a graph, but it’s usually quite easy if there are two blocks to compare. I do also find that it’s quite hard to match up two similar colours in the red/green spectrum, regardless of size, unless they are actually next to each other. I also struggle to differentiate between bright green and yellow, dark green and brown and sometimes blue and purple; to the point where I don’t know which of the two to call something. This I guess is not related to edge detection. As an aside, I love this kind of content - well written, interesting and not on some bland platform like Facebook or Medium. It reminds me of the sort of stuff I used to discover with Stumbleupon. Any recommendations where to find this kind of stuff, except for on here?
- aspyct 6y agoThis is a super interesting article! However some parts of it are... well they are true for me as well, even though I'm pretty sure I'm not colorblind. This, in particular: > Another consequence of all this is that I see very little color in the stars. It's all white for me... Am I missing colors?
- weinzierl 6y ago> "First, choose colors that can be easily distinguished. If possible, keep them far apart on the spectrum. If not, differentiate them some other way, such as by intensity or saturation." Because "keep them far apart" on the spectrum might not be helpful when taken litereally, here is a link to Lines of Confusion Diagrams im CIE 1932 color space. https://www.color-blindness.com/2007/01/23/confusion-lines-of-the-cie-1931-color-space/ https://www.color-blindness.com/2007/01/23/confusion-lines-o... > "Second, use other cues if possible. Color is complex, so if you can add another component to a line on a graph, such as a dashed versus dotted pattern, or even good labeling, that helps a lot." I find this easier said than done. My issue with alternative cues is that they often introduce a form of unintentional order or hierarchy. For example: When I want to plot two different variables and I want to avoid that one of them appears more important than the other I can do this nicely with color. Other line attributes are not so easy. A solid line will always seem more important than a dashed or grey line and a dashed line more important than dotted one. Trying to change the dash and dot pattern so that they have similar grey values makes them hard to distinguish. I find color is the easiest way to distinguish things without introducing unintentional order.
- godDLL 6y agoIf you're colorblind you should know that since 2018 or so there are special glasses to aid your specific type of color blindness. You can buy them, put them on and in 3 seconds you have color differentiation where previously there was not.