My degree of colorblindness:

My two eyes see different colors. This is actually quite weird and I wonder if that affects other people...

No one in my family, both lineage and extended, is colorblind at all. My wife's father was very R-G color blind and it seems my son is mildly as well.

Anyone out there laughing at the pitiful earthlings with their puny RGB vision?

I'm black-grey colour blind, can someone tell me what this poll is about?

I am severely red-green color blind. I am midly blue-yellow color blind.

And the correct term is Color Deficiency Disorder, you insenstive clod.

I'm a UI designer for Slashdot...

Not being colorblind myself I have found myself making awkward mistakes in the past; producing documents with graphs where all lines only had different colors. Or making a website where a background changes from green to red if something goes wrong. A colorblind person will have a hard time telling what is what. The golden rule is to differentiate twice, like have a graph with colored lines but also using different line patterns at the same time. Or not just change a background color, but blink it at the same time. The poll shows (at least) 10% would be helped with a little better interface designs.

One time, he got the chore of painting his aunt's house. He went to the store, bought the paint, prepped the house, and painted it pink. His aunt was the only one who didn't think it was a hilarious way to find out about being colorblind.

Being male, I can't be a tetrachromat, but on more than one occasion I've demonstrated better color discrimination than is considered typical for males (at least as I've been told by female graphic designers). Although rare, these defects do occur in females well -- I had a girlfriend who had difficulty distinguishing between pale pink, pale orange, tan, and light gray. This was limited to pastels though, she was fine once the color saturation got bumped up a bit.

According to the cute asian lady who checked my eyes last time, I'm colorblind (sure, I can still read color codes on capacitors and resistors), she explained to me they are different kinds of color blindness, Found out I can't see different shades of Orange (or Green) :(

Multiple episodes show grey as pink (Klingon uniforms), because one of the guys was in fact colorblind to grey

I can even see octarine.

I do Ishihara every time I renew my aviation medical certificate.

To respect the spirit of the test I make a point of not memorizing the numbers, and always call the number at a glance.

Some years ago I had a colleague who chose such odd colour combinations for her clothes we wondered if she had issues in this area. This is indeed unusual in a woman, but it happens.

...laura

I seem to recall reading a stat some years back that approx 20% of men were colorblind to some degree; the percent for women was lower, but I don't remember it.

It can manifest in situations like; you have several pairs of socks, you wash them at the same time, but some are dark blue and some are black. You go to sort them and you can't distinguish in order to pair them up. Some people have tremendous difficulty telling the difference.

And judging by some of the house color choices in my neighborhood recently, colorblindness is becoming an epidemic!

can see more colors (women only)
can see polarized light (rare)

If you passed the standard screening test in school, you probably thought you were perfect in this regard. Actually, most of us have some weakness and there are tests for that. Try this one [color-blindness.com]. It was rather tedious for me; one of the hardest perceptual tests I've taken. You need patience, so set aside some time. I got a TES (Total Error Score) of 12. YMMV because of monitor quality and other factors. The official version of this test uses actual physical tiles, and specifies what kind of lighting to use in the room.

A normal human sees three colors. We are incapable of distinguishing true orange light from an essentially infinite number of combinations of color pairs (e.g., red plus a bit of green, or red plus more yellow). All we can say is that two chemicals were stimulated in the proper proportion.

It needn't be this way. Your ears detect individual frequencies. If you hear two tones at 1kHz and 2KhZ, your ears don't average them together and tell you that there is a single tone at 1.5 kHz

What would true color vision be like, i.e., if your eyes could actually tell what frequencies of light they received?

This poll confirms this fact (assumption: Slashdot readers are predominantly male).

I am not colour blind, but I can only distinguish 8 colours, including black and white, because I simply don't care about the other shades.
Male only :)

As I write this, 7% of votes are for "mild" and 1% for "severe" red-green colour blindness. Remarkably, about 8% of males are believed to suffer from red-green colour blindness. (It's perhaps reasonable to assume that great majority of slashdotters are male - if not, apologies to the ladies).

http://www.xrite.com/online-co... [xrite.com] ...I have rather good color perception for a male.

I know for 100% fact I'm not colourblind...

I've known for 30 years that I was colour confused, it was diagnosed during my pre-hire medical at IBM. I've always described it symptomatically, as in "certain pinks and purples appear grey, my favourite brown shirt is green, but occasionally, I'll see a hint of green". And I've long thought that my CC was partly influenced by diet (the shirt would be greener after meals in certain restaurants, but I could never pin down the magic ingredient combo).

I have it on good authority that Mars is red, but I see it as a faint light of undetermined colour.

I had my eyes checked last week. I said all of the above to the examiner. He said something along the lines of "Huh, I've never heard of that before".

Then I described how I have a hard time scooping the yard: I have to work really hard to see the shit for the grass, but when I do, it becomes more obvious. There isn't enough contrast for me to pick it out without cognitive effort, but with said effort it becomes clear.

"Huh", he said, "It sounds like you have a very mild form of red-green colour blindness".

Interesting. I've never had a problem with traffic lights, red is one of my favourite colours, and I love the infinite variety of greens of spring. But picking a cardinal out in a dark green tree is tough - do-able, but tough. It's much easier in a light green tree.

So two weeks ago I would have answered "different form" but today I chose "mild R-G".

As my daughter would say, "That was a great old man story, thanks for sharing".

When I was in high school my Biology 20 teacher found an old book in the library with various colour blindness test diagrams in it, and thought it would be fun to pass it around during class everyone could check it out.
On the the guys at the back of the class (you know the ones) cheated on it.

I drove across the country with a good friend, who is severely red-green colorblind. About once a day, he would offer me peanuts, even though I'm deathly allergic to them, and then he'd laugh, and say "oh, these are really good." After five days of this, as we were driving across Colorado after a storm, I stopped to look at a stunning rainbow, and he's like "ooh, ok, fine, whatever"

He's a very successful computer animator and landscape painter. It helps that he is super-smart, but I still can't imagine how he does it.

You always see mice shown as gray in cartoons, it's their default state. I've had mice, and they're a deep brown loamy earth color... but my friends still thought they were gray. So, I don't know what that's all about but, there appears to be ranges of color perception that aren't really clocked as "color blindness", which may not be an entirely useful phrase for something that isn't exactly binary. Now, if you specify that you're "red-green colorblind" that gives me some practical information. I'd probably still be curious as to what color you thought a mouse was.