LEDs are great but very troublesome for someone suffering from color blindness! I don’t know why, but the colors used with LEDs are in most cases indistinguishable for me and therefore not usable the way they should be.

Here comes my story which happened just the other day and shows one more time, why colorblind men are suffering under LED lights:

I bought a new wlan router and when I started it up all the lights turned on, one after the other. So far everything ok. But then the connection didn’t work and the story begins.

At this moment I didn’t think about the colors of the lights. They were on and that’s what they supposed to be in my colorblind eyes. So I started looking for the error, tried several settings, restarted the router many times and so on. After about an hour I started to think about the colors of the LEDs: “Are they really green? Or maybe yellow?”

As I couldn’t tell what colors they were I asked my not colorblind son who is 3.5 years old. He started naming the colors from the left side: “Yellow, yellow, red.” — “What?!”

I asked my son again and again. Telling him that he might mix up the colors. In the end he really was mixed up and started to say what I wanted to hear from him, that all the lights show the same light…

Now here comes the funny part of the story: As I couldn’t make it work I called the support line. A nice women tried to help me to fix the problem. When she asked for the colors…. Well, I said for me they look ok, but my son tells me something different. She couldn’t really believe that I couldn’t tell her if one light is red or not. I felt so stupid and I thought she thinks I’m stupid.

After the unfortunately fruitless telephone call I remembered my little tool Seekey. And this time I thought: “Wow! My son is right, I’m wrong, and I’m really so stupid.” Through the Seekey I could see that there really was a difference between the lights. I still couldn’t tell the colors, but at least knew that there is something going wrong.

Isn’t this incredible. Just some little LED lights can make your time sometimes so frustrating. I still can’t tell if the lights are red or yellow. And if you say they are green, I would believe it. — And again my request: If you are working with LEDs make sure that your colorblind friends can also see the colors!

Dear readers,
Tell me and be honest: can you see a difference in color between this picture and the first one? – I definitely can not.

By the way, the story with the broken router was done after a few more calls and a whole afternoon of searching for the bug.

PS: I asked my son one more time to confirm, that the colors are really different. He said: “Yellow, yellow, red” and smiled at me… And hey, my wife just said she would call it green-green-red. Now if even the not colorblind aren’t sure how can I ever be sure? :-)

I am red-green colorblind and my son is not.

Last week we were with the whole family on ski holidays. It was snowing almost the whole week long. Not really good weather, but anyway we had a good time with all the snow.

One day together with my 3 yo. son we took some plastic plates which are meant to sit on and slide down the hills, like some sort of sledges. One of them in a bright yellow and the other one in a bright green. Both very bright colors.

When we stood on the hill my son said: “I take the green one, you can have the yellow sledge.”

I said: “Which is the green one?”

He looked at me — puzzled. (What does he mean? Why does he ask me that? One is green and one is yellow, that’s for sure. Is my father to stupid to see that?)

My son said: “Can’t you see the colors?”

I said: “No, I’m sorry.”

—

And I suppose, he forgot about it again just in that very moment. A next situation like this will arrive soon, I’m sure.

We have got an appletree in our garden and today I finally found some time (and motivation) to pick all the ripe apples. Besides handling them with care and sorting them out, the toughest part for me definitely was the picking itself.

My red-green color blindness turned out to be quite a handicap while trying to find all the apples on the tree. The apples are mostly yellow with some of them turning red. I also wanted to pick the rotten ones which show any color between yellow-red and brown.

As the tree has many green leaves and brown branches it was really hard work to spot all yellow, red and brown apples. Not because they were hidden inside the tree but because I couldn’t really spot them by their color.

The picture here pretty much shows you how it looked like. You might say now, that there isn’t a huge difference between the apple and the leaves even for somebody with normal color vision. But for my colorblind eyes, there is no color difference at all. I can only spot the apple by its shape.

Conclusion: I definitely wont become a fruitpicker—at least not in this colorblind life.

I always try to be smart when I use different colors to point out something. But it happens again and again that I still mix up the colors—even if I put together a good strategy.

This time it happened when coloring a simple graphics illustrating a project lifecycle model. It consists of six modules and therefore I was looking for six different colors for coloring them. And this was where the whole problem started.

How can I choose six different colors from a set of about twenty crayons, which I won’t mix up? The simple answer is: I can’t.

I really tried to find colors which are easily distinguishable even for my eyes. But with my color blindness this is almost impossible. I’ve chosen the following colors:

• Blue
• Yellow
• Red
• Violet
• Orange
• Green

I arranged them in the above order to be sure not to mix them up. The color pairs blue/violet, yellow/orange and red/green looked very close to each other for my colorblind eyes.

But of course it didn’t work. Suddenly I didn’t had the correct order anymore and it started to get problematic. So I didn’t color red and green right away, because they are the most problem colors for a red-green colorblind guy like me. I colored them only after my presentation, when there was more time to have a closer look at the crayons.

So everything was perfect now? Unfortunately not. I couldn’t believe it but someone else (with not color vision problem like me) did point out to me, that I colored two modules in blue…

How could I just mix up violet and blue? I used the wrong color again. Unbelievable but I just can’t distinguish six colors.

And what do I learn for the next time: Ask somebody else to do it for you.

I need a new pair of glasses and therefor I went to visit the optometrist to test my eyesight. Just before I shook hands with the optometrist I told my wife, that they are always using those tests with a red and a green half, differing in acuity and my color blindness doesn’t let me name them 100% accurate.

Usually the optometrist asks, if the acuity of red or the green half is better and I answer with left or right just because I’m not sure if I pick the right color name. This time it was even better. After a few tests…

Optometrist: You’ll see a red and a green part.
Me: I’m colorblind.
Optometrist: Oh, doesn’t matter. Just tell me which side is better for your eyes.
Me: I can’t really see the red one.
Optometrist: Doesn’t matter. Just tell me.
Me: Green on the right.
Optometrist: Ok. — And now?
Me: The red has no contrast for me. I can’t really see it.
Optometrist: We will see. Which is better for you?
Me: Green again.
Optometrist: And now?
Me: Green. I can’t see the red. And green doesn’t look sharp at all.
Optometrist: Hmm. — What about this?
Me: Green. But very bad.
Optometrist: Ok. We will switch to another test.

She changed the test to another one which was no problem for me. But after a short while she switched back again to the red and green halves.

Optometrist: Can you see this?
Me: Not really.
Optometrist: Which is better?
Me: Green again. But I can’t see the red.
Optometrist: Ok. — And this?
Me: Green, but very blurry. There is no contrast on the red side.
Optometrist: Well, doesn’t really matter. We go on from here.

Finally. – Finally she understood that I can’t see any contrast on the red side because of my color blindness. It was just impossible for me to compare those two parts.

Only after the test I really realized, how crazy this must have sound to the optometrist. Maybe she encountered the first time someone like me with a strong red-blindness. How strange to hear that someone can’t see although he can see.

But I ask myself, why do they still have those tests in use. Shouldn’t they have learned in the last years? I suppose those tests easily could be switched to another color which is much better visible for us red-blind guys. — Dear optometrists, change your test setup taking also color blindness into account.

I’ve got a laptop and I’m writing this story down on it right now. It has three little LED lights shining steadily and one blinking on an USB device. But which color are they?

A lot of LED lights are used to show you different states of just anything. Either its on or off, connected or not, loaded or empty, working or on hold, not loading or loading, and more. Right now I can think of several devices in my household which have LED lights on them to show me just anything and everything: stereo, router, electrical toothbrush, electrical razor, sawing machine, digital camera and of course my laptop.

All of those LEDs want to tell me something, but I can’t see it. Due to my color blindness I just don’t see the difference between those green, red, orange and yellow shades. I can distinguish the blue ones from all the colors above, but this combination is unfortunately not often used.

Have a look at this very nice picture taken by Sebastian Yepes F. He says that this picture is made by a red and a green LED light. I can’t see them.

I mean, I can see the colored circles, but aren’t they in some shades of orange, or maybe yellow, or—oh I don’t know.

Or this nice rainbow taken by Andrew Hoyer. Shall I listen the colors I can see: red (or brown?), red (or orange or what?), green (or yellow or still orange), then brighter blue, blue, darker blue.

I definitely like the first three. Unfortunately this are the ones most often used inside electrical devices—which are not designed for the colorblind.

So dear manufacturers of things including LED lights which should tell me something: Please either use blue combined with yellow, which should be differentiable by everyone, or use blinking and non blinking LED lights. Colorblind persons have huge problems with all those little lights in green, yellow, orange and red. And as there are up to 10% of all men colorblind, this is definitely something to think about.

By the way, I never know it the batteries are loaded on my laptop or not just by looking at the battery LED. I either just plug it long enough or ask my not colorblind wife :-)