First of all, why should I battle color blindness? Usually your genes decide if you are colorblind or not and this you can’t change for your whole life (at least not until today). That’s why you just have to accept it the way it is. But on the other hand, why not try to compete it and try to overcome the handicap.

If you are suffering from any kind of color blindness you know that this handicap follows you through everyday life. In the supermarket when you buy some fruits or vegetables, at the office when you read the newest diagrams of your sales figures and even at home when you try to choose the right tie for the candlelight dinner with your new girlfriend (approximately 8% of men and only 0.5% of women are affected by color blindness, therefore it’s more likely that you are a colorblind man than a woman).

So why not make life easier and try to overcome this burden. You could just try to learn colors by heart. Remember a color and its name every time you see/hear of a new one. This is like learning new words in a foreign language, the first step isn’t that easy to take but after a while it should get easier learning new colors.

Sadly this doesn’t work for me. I can’t learn a color on a shirt and then fit this color next time when I buy a fruit at the local store. Of course when you once know the color of your shirt you, well, know it. But you just can’t transform it to something else. Not even to another shirt at a clothes shop. So this attempt failed.

Let’s make another effort and take pictures. Pictures on a small digital camera. A camera which you can take easily along with you in your trouser pocket. This gives you the ability to compare the picture gallery with a thing you don’t know the color yet. Just find the best fit and you know it. This way you even get a growing archive of colors to fit and are therefore less helpless when you should buy knew trousers and don’t want to ask the young beautiful shop assistant who is approximately twenty years younger than you.

I know, this is also not a breathtaking idea. Let’s go one step further. Look around for a not colorblind girlfriend. A small lightweight which you even could carry in your bag. This way you have your color matching voice always along with you. You will never bite in a green banana again…

The conclusion out of this is that not the colorblind persons have to battle color blindness but the color viewing persons. They should think more actively about it when drawing a diagram, preparing a presentation, designing some new color codes or developing a new product. And this also means to me that the industry has to take into account that almost every tenth person has some kind of color vision confusion.

Think about it.

Yesterday I went shopping. First I needed some fruits whereas I always encounter the same problem: Are the bananas already ripe or still green? At a first glance I couldn’t tell the difference and I didn’t like to ask a shop assistant or bite into a green banana at home. That’s why I took out my brand new ColorLuminator, held it onto the banana and pressed the one and only button. In an instance I could read the correct color on the built in screen. They are yellow. Great, I’ll take them.

Afterwards some cloth shopping had to be done as well. I needed some new shirts. My wife said I could buy a very fashioned purple one and a light green which would fit to my new trousers. So I went to the shop and had a look around. But there were so many shirts to choose from, which would usually be a very hard decision and often a lucky strike with my color blindness. And I was not in the mood to tell the story of my color blindness to the salesclerk. Again I took out my new favourite device, the ColorLuminator, pointed onto some shirts and found with its help the sought-after purple shirt.

On my why home the sun light was shining directly into the traffic lights and I couldn’t see if red or green is glowing. But again with the help of my ColorLuminator I made my way home safely.

Wouldn’t it be great? Great to have such a tool. Unfortunately this is not true yet. You can’t buy a ColorLuminator in the stores today. But Ian Cannon, a 17 year old student from Sydney, developed a tool like this and is on the way to maybe win the Nescafe Big Break, a big prize for young entrepreneurs. With the help of publicitiy and the money he could maybe make a dream come true and develop the ColorLuminator for the mass market. He was already thinking about this idea when he was 12. But only when he understood how to measure color he could start developing his Luminance Contrast Device.

I am looking forward to see some kind of tool like this ready to use. It could be of great help for people suffering any kind of color blindness. And maybe, if we look even further into the future, the ColorLuminator could be built into your glasses and show the name of the color you focus on directly on the glass itself. Wonderful.

Further readings:
Nescafé Big Break: Finalists 2006
Hot recipes for niche success

Related articles:
Green Bananas
Shopping for my Boy
Walk – Don’t Walk