Football kit - You maybe uninterested and to be fair it's not one of lifes biggest problems but if you've paid good money to watch a match then you might reasonably expect the kit colours to be chosen so as to be accessible to everyone.
Absolutely. I just couldn't tell what kit in the photo in question was supposed to be ambiguous (I was obviously missing something, as both the normal and the simulation appeared the same to me), but I could tell all the strips apart reasonably well, as the more ambiguous colours had different patterns. But maybe that was the point? Who knows. Alt text, people!
Fire exits - I read the text so couldn't tell you what colour they are anyway.
Exactly. I think that's the thing that people don't really understand about (congenital
[1]) colourblindness. Sure, we have trouble distinguishing certain colours, but that's only a problem in situations where colour is the only way to discriminate things.
People who have grown up with anomalous colour vision will learn to see by contrast, and pay relatively little attention to colour. If there's readable text on something, we'll go by that and probably not even think about what colour something is. Since we experience a large chunk of the colour spectrum as subtle differences in brightness, we're pretty good at spotting subtle differences in brightness - we might not be able to put a name to some colours, but we're skilled at pairing socks according to how many times they've been washed.
The other thing people miss is that size (that is, angular size in the field of vision) matters. Any sufficiently small object ceases to have colour. Birds all look the same, apart from the white ones. Resistors of less than 0.5W are a lost cause.
Point sources of light are point sources of light, and the idea that stars are different colours is crazy talk. Traffic lights are completely unambiguous when you're anywhere near the stop line - the colours are optimised for ease of discrimination anyway, but even if we can't the position tells us what's going on - but it's quite possible to mistake a distant green traffic light for a random open white tungsten lamp.
Protanopia's a special case in that it actually reduces the range of wavelengths we're sensitive to. Barakta can see black-body radiation that I'd class as infra-red. Rear lights are never bright enough to be annoying.
People say that colourblind people don't go around memorising the colours of things. This is bollocks. We have to do it all the time, because normal people have this irritating habit of referring to things by colour, even when they have some more distinctive attribute. So you learn that the medium-sized rucksack's name is "the green rucksack" or that you need to refer to the blue chopping board as "the purple chopping board" if you want to ask someone to pass it to you. If someone asks you to get the blue bagels, it's best to work out what flavour they mean, so you can identify them by the obvious text on the packaging. People are odd.
At least that site educates people that we can see colours just differently and not in back and white** and that with a little care with design you can make things easy for people rather than difficult.
Oh yes. There's some good awareness stuff there. It's just frustrating to follow as a colourblind person.
One of my pet hates is ski resort piste map boards that use red and green lights to denote closed and open pistes - that is a bit dangerous.
Not being a skier I haven't encountered that. Seems daft when all you need to do is have a light (of any colour) to denote open pistes. That way it's accessible, simple and fail-safe.
An ex GF who taught A level biology and should have known a bit about genetics thought that. When I asked her how the colourblind kids in her school got on she said quite seriously that she'd never taught a coloublind pupil.
One of the things that feed does make good noise about is that many people (especially school-age ones) with the less dramatic forms of impairment won't *know* they're colourblind. They'll have learned to cope with most most real-world situations, and in an educational context - much like with mild hearing problems - errors due to colour ambiguity can easily be mistaken for failure to understand whatever subject material is being tested, and overlooked.
Another good thing I saw mentioned there: Coloured pencils with the name of the colour printed on them! How obvious and sensible is that (helps children learn to read, as well as disambiguating colours)? The EU should make it fucking mandatory.
[1] Acquired colourblindness due to other conditions is a different badger entirely.
