This was a very interesting article
How do you not know you're colorblind into adulthood?
I've always heard the red/green colorblind is exactly that, that they can't distinguish between the 2 colors (this article says it) but never elaborates, does that mean they seem them both as red? both as green? or both as something else? (gray maybe?)
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When my 7-year-old son, Everett, looks around our house, he sees the bright red Georgia Bulldogs flag on our front porch as a yellowish brown. Vibrant pink begonias in our garden are white. Inside his paint set, what looks to me like a kaleidoscope of dazzling pigments is to him a collection of murky browns, khakis, yellows and blues.
Everett has red-green color deficiency, commonly known as being colorblind. I don’t, but I recently used an app called the
Chromatic Vision Simulator to glimpse how he views our surroundings. What I saw, above all, was a world without many of the color cues that the rest of us casually use to categorize, sort and learn — and that teachers use to pass information on to others.
Countless students like Everett have a vision deficiency without even knowing about it.
One out of every 12 boys, or people assigned male at birth, are colorblind, and 1 in 200 people assigned female at birth have the condition, too.
Despite this prevalence,
only 11 states test for colorblindness during elementary school fall vision screenings. Even ophthalmologists don’t routinely test for it. Including colorblindness screenings in those tests would be a simple move, and one that could make learning easier for thousands of American students.
In a class of 24 students, there is approximately one child who can’t see the pink marker the teacher uses on the whiteboard, who is unable to denote their team’s jerseys in gym, or who wonders why the rest of the science class is marveling over a chemical reaction that doesn’t look any different to him.
In most cases, being colorblind doesn’t mean people can’t see color, but that they see them differently. Often, certain hues — such as red and green — are indistinguishable.
Studies suggest that 80 percent of classroom learning is visual, especially in elementary school, where colors play a large role. Using colors to denote specific information — such as a vivid pie chart, a color-coded map of the United States, or a wrong answer marked in red — can cause colorblind students to misunderstand.
Teachers and parents can support these pupils by making easy modifications. However, they need to know there’s a vision deficiency in the first place.
According to research by a maker of color-vision glasses, many children don’t find out they’re colorblind until 7th grade, and many others are unaware into adulthood. Imagine how that can affect a child’s confidence. Scott Hanson, a colorblind principal in Cottonwood, Minn., told me that he felt relieved when he discovered that he was colorblind in high school. “Suddenly, I understood why I hated art class as a kid and was teased for coloring Minnesota Vikings jerseys blue instead of purple. When you’re unsure of your colors, you’re unsure of everything,” he said.
When schools in Roanoke County, Va., started colorblindness testing in 2018, they discovered that almost 3 percent of
the student population was colorblind. And many children who needed special-education services were colorblind, too. The findings made officials wonder whether the students really needed those services or whether they had just had a hard time learning because of their vision deficiency.
Rohit Varma, a doctor and researcher who founded the
Southern California Eye Institute and has
studied color vision deficiency in preschool-aged children, says that’s the problem with not routinely testing kids for colorblindness. “From an early age, tasks that children do at school require color. When a child is confused by those tasks, it’s easy to assume that they are not intellectually able when they just see the world differently,” he says............
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/07/colorblind-children-testing-school/