
Colorblind travelers can take in fall's true colors with special new lenses - bookofjoe
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/08/28/colorblind-travelers-can-take-true-colors-fall-thanks-these-viewfinders/
======
peacefulhat
I'm colorblind and have to call bullshit on all the people crying because they
"saw red" for the first time. Try out "color vision" on your computer with a
software-based screen filter that shifts the color intensities first before
you buy these glasses. Now they've even tricked the government into it.

~~~
ksaj
I believe they are not reacting to red, but by the ability to differentiate it
from other colours.

I'm colour blind in one eye only. For that reason, I quite want to try them
out to see what exactly the lenses do to change the appearance.

~~~
peacefulhat
Mac and Windows have this functionality in the accessibility settings if you
want to try it out.

~~~
ksaj
I thought they had colour pallets that are appropriate for various blindnesses
(ex: for yellow/blue blind folks, green, blue and cyan are all the same
colour, so you wouldn't use more than one of that set of colours in any given
pallet).

I don't need that since I see fairly normal colour in the other eye, and so I
have an immediate "converter" to see what the visual difference is between
yellow/blue blindness and normal vision. I literally don't even notice unless
my right eye vision is blocked. I see a properly coloured world as long as
both eyes (or my right eye alone) are seeing it.

I don't think the OS/X and Windows things are emulating what the glasses do.
The glasses are filtering out overlapping colour frequencies (as seen by the
eye's cones) so the R G and B are more distinct. That's completely different.
This is limiting the noise, versus changing the whole colour pallet.

Interestingly images altered to look like yellow/blue blindness look the same
to both my eyes, so I'd say they're pretty accurate. There are some small
discrepancies, but very few in most that I've seen. I actually find that a
little jarring because of course my right eye protests this invasion of
missing colours.

------
ksaj
Since I'm yellow/blue blind in one eye, but not both, it would be really
interesting to try these lenses since I would be able to describe the way
things look from both colour blind and "normal" vision.

Also, I read that they haven't really tested these glasses with yellow/blue
blind folks (red/green blindness is far more common) to know if it is all that
useful for them.

~~~
andi999
I am very curious about this. Which color do you see when you look at yellow
and which when you look at blue? And do the other colors look the same as with
your other eye?

~~~
ksaj
It depends on what kind of yellow. Dark yellow can look tan or even pinkish.
Light yellow is white. I can't see yellow highlighter at all unless the light
is making it glow - then it just looks shinier than the surroundings. Light
blue is generally cyan, and otherwise it is pretty much black. I actually
quite like "lego blue" or "versace blue" because they look so extremely
different between each eye.

The colour that surprises people most is that blue and green both look the
same, and by "same" I mean they both look like cyan - pretty much an entirely
different colour. At night time, the blue light on the buses and the green
traffic lights are exactly the same colour of cyan to my left eye. They're the
normal blue and green to my right eye.

Only some colours "agree" between both eyes. For example, the HN logo is very
close to the same colour. Only I can tell it is orange with the right eye. It
looks simply darker (and therefore browner) with the left. And red looks like
red. That one we can pretty much all agree on.

------
efournie
Those do not work for everyone. I bought some glasses from this company for my
father, both he and a colorblind colleague could not see any improvement apart
from a slight contrast increase after a few hours of wearing them. One of them
was slightly red-green colorblind, the other one had a much stronger red-green
color blindness. The company seem to exaggerate a lot the effect of their
lenses with carefully selected overenthusiastic testimonies. The good thing is
that the glasses could be returned and refunded.

------
gus_massa
Is there a more technical details of what the lens do? If he has some problem
in the cones, no optical of digital processing can magically make it
beautiful.

> “ _It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. That red, it’s
> just gorgeous. It’s incredible._ ”

~~~
bookofjoe
[https://enchroma.com/pages/technology](https://enchroma.com/pages/technology)

~~~
gus_massa
This has more info: [https://enchroma.com/pages/how-enchroma-glasses-
work](https://enchroma.com/pages/how-enchroma-glasses-work) It removes the
light in some region between red and green. It _may_ be useful in some cases
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Classification)

Before buying one, I'd recommend to test it with red and green peppers/apples
to see if they work as intended, but also with a lemon and an orange to see
what happens with the intermediate colors.

------
welcome_dragon
We have these in Tennessee at some state parks. As a colorblind person, I
don't really know what I'm missing out on so I'm very much looking forward to
trying them out when the leaves change this Fall!

