I can remember the day well. I was in fourth grade and my art teacher had mentioned to my parents that she thought I might be colorblind. My mom walked me down Pine Street in Rolla, Missouri and into an eye doctor's office. Shortly thereafter, I was looking at a small book with white pages and groups of colored circles. Some of the pages held numbers hidden in the colored circles, some didn't.

Little did I know how much that day would become the start of a long and interesting journey down the path of being categorized as color bind. I've looked around the internet and nobody seems to use the terms I was originally told; red-green and blue-purple. What does these mean to people that see colors normally?

Simply put, place a red crayon next to a green crayon and I will be able to tell that they are different shades, and depending on the variance, I might be able to tell you which crayon is which color. The same will happen if you use blue and purple (or various shades) crayons.

Let me quickly answer any questions you may have.

1. Your jeans? They are blue. Nobody makes purple jeans.
2. Your shirt. If you are a male, it's not going to be purple, so if it's questionable to me, I will simply assume it's blue until told otherwise.
3. My eyes? Hazel, it's on my driver's license. Your eyes? Aren't you old enough to know your eye color?
4. That car? If it's a sports car, red. If it's a truck, well, I know most colors made by most car companies, so I will probably simply "know" the color.
5. I have all my clothes memorized. Blue pants are evil and don't match with anything, no matter what anyone says. This doesn't mean that I haven't had to walk down the block to my Aunt's house at 6am in the morning because my wife was gone and I had an interview in the morning and I had a new tie that my wife hadn't cleared which shirts it matched with. I've also had to take photos of a shirt/tie combo to upload to my website for my grandmother to look at so I could go to an interview not looking like a fool with a mismatched tie.

Now that those questions are out of the way, lets move to how being colorblind has actually effected my life. I would say the first time that I really noticed colorblindness effecting me was the first time I went to land navigation training. It was my freshman year of Marine Corps ROTC at Auburn University. We were all given a compass, map, coordinates and distances, and were asked to do basic land navigation. Initially, I didn't think anything about it.

Here I am, in the woods, doing what I would normally do if I was in the back country and possibly a little lost. I reach my first point and start to look around for the "piece of tape, stuck to a tree, with the code word to prove you made it". After standing in one spot franticly searching all surrounding trees for "tape", I hear the voice of a senior behind me.

"Thompson, what the hell are you doing standing there?" Great. What do I say now? Thinking nothing of it, I tell him that I have been standing at this point searching for a "piece of tape" for no less than five minutes. After some cussing, laughing, and normal berating, he walks to the tree closest to me and lifts of a piece of orange boundary tape with some black letters on it.

Having to explain to my commanding officer that I am colorblind and that it was never found in the initial physicals was interesting. After that day I believe they switched to blue tape. From then until I started doing web development, I don't believe being colorblind was an issue. I didn't know it at the time, but hunters are better at picking out prey against a confusing background, and the military have found that color blind soldiers can sometimes see through camouflage that fools everyone else.

Once I started web developing, it became apparent that being colorblind could be an issue. Initially it wasn't a concern because I worked with two designers that did most css color styling and left structure to me. This worked out extremely well for me since I had the opportunity to learn common web colors from experienced designers. I don't actually think those designers ever noticed that I was color bind.

From there I started picking up a number of tricks to help avoid the situation of having to explain to coworkers that I was color bind. The first tool that came to be my savior is Colorpicker. This bad boy is a godsend.

In the four or five organizations I have worked for as a web developer over the last five years, I don't believe the question of whether or not I was color blind has ever come up in an interview. Should it have? I'll tell you what, I would be cautious about hiring a color blind web developer. It's definitely a point of interest. Do I think we should be discriminated against? Not in the least. Just understand that it's something that will have to be dealt with.

Being color blind has probably had less effect on my personal life. When I played Everquest II it was impossible to tell if a monster was going to be aggressive toward me due to the only indications being the one pixel red font border on their name. Why couldn't Sony make the indicator for aggressive mobs and asterisk? No idea, but I know enough of us(color blind people) complained about the issue on their forums and to their support email with not a single response. When I play Risk with friends and family, we can only play with four people due to three of the colors looking the same to me. Why couldn't they have made the colors white, black, orange, red, yellow, and blue? Good question. I guess nobody at Hasbro did product testing with color blind people.

So, there's my life story. Take it or leave it. I've always thought the Marine Corps motto of "improvise, adapt and overcome" has been basically how I have dealt with the issue. Oddly enough, my wife's mother's mother was color bind and my wife's father is color blind, but some how my son didn't end up being color blind.

Name: ^*

Website: ^{(used as a track back)}

Email: ^{(never displayed, used to notify you of responses)}

Comment: ^* html allowed