Laser pointers are often used in presentations to show the hot spots or a part of the slide which the presenter is talking about. Most often people don’t know about the drawbacks concerning colorblind members of the audience when using laser pointers.

If you are not affected by color blindness the little red or green spot which is produced by a laser pointer can not be overseen. The little dot is so bright, shiny and clear that your eye easily finds it. Even following the light if it is moved quite fast isn’t a problem at all.

Now if we look at it through colorblind eyes this looks totaly different. Maybe this affects only people with red-green color blindness because of the color used in laser pointers. The laser pointer spot just isn’t that much outshining to colorblind people as it should be. Therefore it is very hard to follow the point – or often it can’t even be seen at all.

Intensive laser pointer usage combined with fast movements can make it very demanding for people affected by color blindness to follow a presentation.

Here are my suggestions to you for the next time you are doing a presentation. If you use a laser pointer and want to make it an enjoyable experience equally for all listeners follow these three guidelines:

1. Hold still. Don’t move the laser pointer every time you start explaining something but hold still for a few seconds. This gives the listeners enough time to find the spot and see what you would like to emphasize.
2. Move slowly. After hold still you can start moving, but do it slowly. Often presenters are moving much to fast and through this some persons are loosing track of the point.
3. Say what you show. Forget the words here, there, over there and so on. Label it correctly like on the upper left side or the first part of the diagram. Through this your audience knows what you are talking about even if they can’t see the laser point.

Laser pointers are a great tool because they are very handy and can be used to point out things which are way up or on the other side of where you stand. But don’t use them like a lightsaber. Use them smart and well directed. Don’t let the laser pointer lead you but lead the laser pointer.

Related articles:
Colorblind Population
How the World is Seen through Colorblind Eyes

While surfing the web I came across the following article and because it is in someway related to color blindness I decided to reproduce it hereafter:

Next time you have a meal, look at your plate – what colors do you see? If its mostly white and brown then your diet might be colorblind!

In order to have a healthy diet you need foods from all the food groups and that means a colorful plate. Just eating meat and potatoes won’t provide you with the essential vitamins and minerals you need to stay in your best health – you need to add in colorful fruits and vegetables!

If you want a good balanced diet, here’s some colors you might want to see next time you look down at your plate:

Green
Green colored foods like peas, kale, spinach, honeydew melons, kiwifruit, dark leafy lettuces, and leafy greens contain lutein which helps maintain good vision and can help reduce the risk of macular degeneration and cataracts.
Another green group includes broccoli, cabbage, bok choy, swiss chard, brussels sprouts, rutabaga, turnips, cauliflower, and watercress. These foods contain indoles, which can help reduce the risks of cancer and reduce tumor growth in cancer patients.

Yellow
The yellow orange colored food are high in bioflavonoids, which work in combination with vitamin C to help reduce the risk of cancer and heart attack. They also contain powerful antioxidants and help maintain healthy skin, strong bones, and good vision. The foods in this group include oranges, tangerines, pears, lemons, nectarines, grapefruit, peaches, apricots, pineapple, pineapple, yellow raisins, and yellow peppers.

Blue and Purple
Blueberries, purple grapes, blackberries, black currents and elderberries contain Anthocyanins which can reduce the risks of heart attack, cancer, diabetic complications, Alzheimer’s disease and age-related memory loss. Dark purple foods contain phenolics, which are powerful antioxidants and can help to slow the effects of aging.

Orange
Dark orange foods like pumpkin, sweet potatoes, apricots, peaches, carrots, cantaloupes, mangoes, and butternut squash contain beta-carotene, a powerful antioxident that can help keep your immune system healthy as well as maintain good vision and can even aid in reducing heart attacks and cancer.

Red
Tomatoes, guava, watermelon and pink grapefruit are all red colored foods. These foods contain lycopene which has been much publicized lately as helping to protect against prostate cancer. In addition, these foods can help reduce the risk of breast, and skin cancer as well as reduce the risk of heart attack.
Red onion, cherries, kidney beans, raspberries, strawberries, cranberries, beets, red apples (with the skin), and red cabbage contain anthocyanins, powerful antioxidants that can help control high blood pressure as well as reduce the risks of cancer, heart attack, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes complications.

One way to get a colorful plate at every meal is to try to fit in 5 servings of fruits and vegetables every day. Try to include food from all these color groups at least once during the day and you will be surprised at how much your health improves.

Lee Dobbins writes for the A2Z Vitamin And Herbs Guide For Natural Healing where you can find out more about vitamins and herbs as well as natural healing methods.

Source: High Quality Article Database – 365articles.com
Photos taken by Esther Perez – Some rights reserved

Our local power provider will introduce new power products starting 1st of October this year. They offer water power and ecological water power, solar power, wind power, bio power, nuclear power and much more. For better readability all the different types of power are color coded.

Fortunately they already offer some ready-made mixtures to choose from which not only rely on colors but also are named (something like ecological power package) and described in detail. And also fortunately the decision has to be made only once and can be forgotten until the next rearrangements.

If you look around you there are uncountable things color coded. Sometimes it looks like as if the designers of such color codes take it for granted that everybody can associate the colors to the correct product, prize, line etc. But that’s a misconception. Too many people suffer from some kind of color blindness and this has to be taken into account when colors are used for labeling.

Remember two simple things when you design color codes for your product:

• Only three distinct colors can be distinguished for sure: A bright one, a medium one and a dark one.
• Use text, patterns or signs along the color codes to enhance the comprehensibility.

If you follow these simple rules you will not be on the wrong side when trying to get your point across – at least not for the colorblinds.

Further reading:
Stromprodukte ab Oktober 2006 (German)

Related articles:
Playing Trivial Pursuit with a Colorblind
Colorblind Population

Only 24 days to go until the soccer world cup 2006 will be kicked off in Germany. There are 32 countries from all around the world fighting for the cup – including Switzerland, my home country, where my heart beats.

Yesterday our national team coach Köbi Kuhn announced the 23-man squad which will travel to Germany next month. But independently who he selected and named on the list or independently if Yakin joins the team or independently if some players were injured during the season, Switzerland will win the World Cup anyway.

Why can I be so sure about this? And how do I know it anyway? If you don’t believe me, keep on reading and I will tell you why my home country will win the race for the cup.

The reason why we will win is because it is all dependent on the jerseys the teams are wearing. The jersey of Switzerland is all red – only red and nothing else.

The color red symbolizes aggressiveness, danger, heat, fire and much more. Researches have shown that teams wearing red have a higher probability of winning and are scoring more goals. This doesn’t mean that they are always winning but the probability speaks for them. And if a game is close it is more often the red team which scores the winning goal.

As we Swiss do have a great team this year and it therefore can get close in every game (if we are not winning anyway) the conclusion is: Switzerland will win the FIFA World Cup 2006.

Further readings:
Red Enhances Human Performance in Contests
FIFA World Cup Germany 2006

Related articles:
Olympic Medals
Skiblind
Fuck the Colorblind

Color circles or color wheels are always hard to decypher because to many colors look similar to me. That’s why I came up with the idea of painting my own color circle on the computer.

It already took me quite some time while trying to accomplish this task. And only recently I found out about the different color perceptions when looking at my LCD from different angles. A horizontal angle shift doesn’t have any visible impact. But changing the vertical viewing angle changed the color perception completely.

When you look at the three color squares (the shown numbers are the corresponding RGB values) they might look similar or different to you depending on your color vision abilities. To my eyes they look all the same when I look at them from a 90° angle. But when I change the viewing angle to about 70° the color perception changes a lot: Now they look all different to me.

It is well known that LCD’s have a narrow viewing angle but I couldn’t find any explanation on the internet to this phenomenon of a relation between color perception and viewing angle.

When changing your viewing angle there is a shift in the brightness. It looks like that this shift makes colors to appear different to my colorblind eyes. While some brightness differences seem to disappear a lot more color differences seem to appear. I never experienced this shift in color perception before while viewing images on a computer screen.

This discovery made me think if it is always like that. There are different tests for color blindness. Do they appear different when looking at the images from a different angle and do I maybe get some better test results?

I tried again the Ishihara colorblind test and also had a look at the color blindness testing poster. But there wasn’t any difference observable. I still could not see most of the signs and numbers :-(

Is it just this special arrangement where the distinct colors are shown separately and in distinct boxes? I don’t know yet. Maybe we will find out more about it in the future but for the moment I am puzzled and it will take me some more time to finish my color(-blind) circle.

Update: Looking at this article with its colored boxed at the office with another LCD the differences are more visible to my eyes. The color perception therefore depends strongly on the monitor yuou use. It can change very much when you alter your display or its settings.

Related articles:
A Colorblind Decides on Colors
Walk – Don’t Walk