University Park, Pa. -- For 8 percent of men, color blindness is not just a fashion inconvenience, but an impairment that makes reading maps and other visual data difficult if not impossible. Now, a Penn State geographer has developed color schemes that allow most color-blind people to interpret the images.
http://www.psu.edu/ur/2000/colorblindness.html
The subject of color-blindness is very interesting to me. My brother is red/green color blind as well as some uncles. This makes me a carrier of the gene, and it very probable that if I should ever have a son he will be color blind as well. I've noticed how different my brother sees things for my whole life, and how confusing it is for him when we say things like go get your green shirt and he claims not to own a green shirt because to him it's black. I've always wondered what he sees exactly. After doing a little research I found some websites that claim to show you what it's like to view the world through color blind eyes. This shows different images and what a normal person would see and how a color blind person views the same image. http://colorvisiontesting.com/what%20colorblind%20people%20see.htm I especially found the image of the stoplight interesting. This is something color blind people see daily, and should probably have been done in different colors given the fact that 2 of the colors look very similar to those with the vision impairment. My own brother said that he doesn't even look at the color, he just looks for the placement of the light.
I did my first topical assignment on color blindness and saw this article which also interests me. I've used this same website before http://webaim.org/articles/visual/colorblind to show the different kinds of color blindness some individuals face. Moreover, I thought it was interesting that 8 men out of 9,000,000 in the U.S. suffer from color blindness, particularly when it comes to green and red.
I do think it is a smart idea to have people make maps and other things so people who are color blind can still convey the same information correctly. I did like how Brewer has found a solution to this problem. "A solution would be to choose blue, light green, greenish white, gray magenta and dark green, a scheme that avoids confusion lines."
It's great that they are working on making "normal" tasks easier for people who are colorblind. When I think about the challenges that colorblind people go through I have never thought about reading a map. I can't get anywhere without a map or GPS I imagine it would be extremely difficult to travel if you couldn't read it correctly.