Color-blindness

[AdmiralMemo]

Since it came up on Alex's stream where a puzzle had red and green dots to line up, and they all looked the same to me, I thought I'd make a thread about color-blindness.

I've got a trifecta of color-blindness: red/green, green/brown, and blue/purple.

Some people ask me to explain what things look like to me, and I can't really tell them, because I have nothing to compare to. I can't tell you what "normal" vision looks like any more than you can understand what I see. Try to ask a blind person what yellow looks like, or a deaf person what birds sound like, and you'll start to see my dilemma. Since I've never seen anything BUT what my color-blind eyes have shown me my entire life, comparing that to "normal" vision is impossible for me.

Anyway, the chat has found a few things that might help. Deuteranomaly is the closest to what I have that I've found.

You can go to this site, upload a picture, and then select that to get pretty close to what I see.

Another thing you could do is go to this other site to see different sites and how they look to me.

For example, this is pretty close to the LRR site to me. Or here is the LoadingReadyLive page converted the same way. (Since the stylesheet breaks, specifically look at the logos of the shows.)

How different does that look to everyone else? They look almost the same to me, but I've heard people say that it looks super freaky to them. What about this page of comparisons?

How weird is this change to anyone else?

Also, how many other Runners are color-blind in some way? Has this affected gameplay/movies/other media?

[Dominic Appleguard]

For me, the deuteranomoly filter makes reds and oranges fade significantly, so they are sorta brown. Blue is pretty much the same.

Oh, and now I notice the green in the "Magic" tab is just gone.

[ch3m1kal]

That filter seems to add some green into most colors which makes all the shades be just slightly off.

Like the background is normally more of a magenta color, while with the filter it's a bit more blue-ish, especially around the rim.

Also all the reds are brown.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I do like the colour combination of blue & orange.

[Arakasi]

That was particularly fascinating, thanks for that Memo. It must be odd, one day finding out that you're missing a part of a sensation that most other people have. Sight is an amazingly complex thing.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

Sight is also affected by language, well with colours. If you language has terminology to distinguish subtle changes in one colour. Say various shades of green, you will be more able to see them as different colours than someone whoes language doesn't.

So, if you show a AAA FPS to the right person, they'll find it very colourful.

[RedNightmare]

They looked very different for me. Interesting.

This is why color-blind modes are so important to me in games, even though I don't need them myself. 8% of men and 0,5% of women developers!

[Ceiran]

I've known I was colour deficient since I was about 4, but it's only fairly recently that anyone's been able to help pinpoint the exact nature of it, and to be honest I still struggle to make sense of the categorisations.
I was sent to the local uni's optometry department by my optician, subjected to about 4 hours of different tests, and eventually told "Yeah, these results don't really make sense, you're sort of red-blue and sort of red-green colourblind, but it's not too severe... Apart from the times that it is."

Turns out I'm essentially blind when it comes to Ishihara tests, practically aced the Munsell hue test (damned if I was going to be beaten by a jumped-up jigsaw puzzle) and was all over the place when it came to the tinted lens thing.

In practice I can't say I'm affected by it too much in everyday life (except for purple. To this day I have no idea what purple looks like). Playing pool or snooker can be awkward, especially on non-green tables, and I find myself with an almost irrepressible urge to maul people who hold things up and ask me what colour it is, but other than that its manageable.

[Ceiran]

Also, I'd find it interesting to hear how other people fare with the hue test, whether any "normal"-sighted people have problems with such fine graduations of colour. (If your monitor isn't properly calibrated this might be difficult.)

http://www.colormunki.com/game/huetest_kiosk

[Geoff_B]

I just tried that and got 22. I know my monitors are slightly off but I doubt they would have much of an impact on the score.

[empath]

WOW; that was really TOUGH! I recalibrated my monitors just a few weeks back when I swapped out my video card.

And though I'm "40-49" I got 28!

*rubs eyes*

Thank you for sharing that - it was FASCINATING!

(I swear there were multiple occasions where I saw a 'darker hue on the wrong side of a lighter hue', then swapped them...ONLY FOR IT TO LOOK MORE WRONG!?! )

[Jamfalcon]

I did that a couple months ago (I think Kathleen put it on Twitter?) and got a perfect score. I have special eyes!

[Elomin Sha]

I scored 8 and that was with glasses off.

[Metcarfre]

Scored 8 as well.

Interestingly color blindness is tangentially related to our researched as it's commonly an X-linked (primarily male) genetic disorder of cone photoreceptor genes.

[AdmiralMemo]

That was particularly fascinating, thanks for that Memo. It must be odd, one day finding out that you're missing a part of a sensation that most other people have. Sight is an amazingly complex thing.

I don't know if it's my body's way of compensating or what, but I do have a heightened sense of smell and taste compared to most people. This leads to me being a finicky eater.

I've had the following argument with many people:

Person: "You don't know if you like something or not until you try it!"
Me: "Well, I've never met anyone who likes the taste of something that smells bad to them, and that smells bad to me."
Person: *sniffs food* "This [Food X] doesn't have a smell!"
Me: "1. Yes it does. 2. I can smell it from here. 3. That smell sickens me."

So apparently, if I'm missing part of my eyes, most people are missing part of their noses.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I got 22. I started imagining colours due to after images. The blues and greens really stumped me because I had two greeny-blues that didn't seem to fit anywhere.

[Metcarfre]

I don't know if it's my body's way of compensating or what

it's not

[Dominic Appleguard]

I got 7. Do I win?

[Dutch guy]

I got 16 (And noticed I REALLY need to make an appointment with my opticien for new glasses)

[Telaril]

I got a perfect score on the hue test the last few times I took it. I've always had excellent color vision.

I make up for it by having terrible depth perception. Certain forms of astigmatism or other vision disorders make it impossible for your eyes to process the "Magic-eye" style 3D. There's actually a formal diagnostic test that makes use of this, where the doctor shows you a bunch of cards with dots on them, and your eyes are supposed to see a shape in in 3D. There were eight pictures. I was the first person she had ever encountered who could see NONE of them. She turned through them becoming more and more incredulous, until at the final one she just assumed I didn't understand the test. "There" she said, pointing to the center of a generic rectangle of dots "You don't see a TRIANGLE floating there?"

I did not.

[Geoff_B]

I should really try that test again at home rather than on monitors I know to be slightly dodgy.

[Antitonic]

Whoop, 3. I guess mixing paint for a living is finally paying off!

[Timelady]

64. And I'm in the 20-29 age range. Then again, I have no idea about the calibration of my monitor, either.

(I swear there were multiple occasions where I saw a 'darker hue on the wrong side of a lighter hue', then swapped them...ONLY FOR IT TO LOOK MORE WRONG!?

YES. THIS. YES.

EDIT: Remembered I had turned my monitor down to 16 bit to run an old game a while back, turned it back up and got 12. THAT MADE A DIFFERENCE, YES. XD

[Volafortis]

I got a 4, went back, immediately saw the two that were wrong (how did I not notice it before?) and resubmitted for a perfect score. Not sure if that counts, though, so I'll say I got a 4.

[AdmiralMemo]

.... and I end up making a big fool of myself by not being able to name colors in another thread...