People tend to have a lot of questions for me when I tell them that I’m colour-blind (that is, if they even believe me) so as it seems to be quite interesting to some people, I thought I would make a blog entry about colour-blindness and the few (very minor) ways in which it affects me.
Right at the start of the day, what’s one of the first things you do? Well, you put on a pair of socks of course, how hard can that be? Well, pretty hard actually because it’s really hard for me to tell which socks are a pair and which ones are odd. I used to have a nice way of avoiding this problem: I’d only buy beige socks. If all my socks were beige (which just happens to be my favourite colour) I could never put on an odd pair. I had this idea in 2008 and I kept it up for quite a while, but in 2012, for some very strange reason, beige socks became very rare and now I can never find any. In fact, I wrote about this sock trouble a little once before. Sometimes I’m told by people that I’m wearing odd socks, and these are people who know why I’m wearing odd socks, so I can’t help but wonder what exactly it is they want me to do with that piece of information.
Another thing is that I find some DVDs so hard to use. Occasionally the cursor on the menu is a very similar colour to the background, and so I can sometimes get completely lost when trying to navigate around DVDs that have large menus. So, when this happens I’ll just ask somebody else to do it for me. You’d think I could just mentally determine how many clicks are needed, but often the DVD player will miss a button press and, if that did happen I’d have no way of knowing.
The biggest problem comes when trying to create creating visual art. As I’m sure all regular readers will know, I keep a webcomic which is mostly photography based but I occasionally need to illustrate things. I use the computer programme Paint because when you hover over one of the colours, it tells you what colour it is. This is enormously helpful. The problem is, sometimes the colour I want isn’t there, so then I write ‘Blue’ into Google Images (yes, that’s right, Paint doesn’t have blue as a default), copy and paste something from there and then use the ‘pipette’ tool to extract the colour. I know what colours things are, but I can’t identify different colours easily..
And that’s about it really. I don’t like it when people use colour as the main way to describe things, though, I understand that that is sometimes the easiest way. For example when people don’t know somebody they might say “that brown haired person” to describe them I might struggle to understand who they mean. If I really try, I can usually identify a colour when I’m looking at it, but it’ll take a little while, and I can’t really do it well from memory, plus, unless I make the conscious effort to identify the colour of something, I’ll just never register it. They’re all minor things, but I know some people are interested in this kind of thing, so, I hope this blog entry, too, was interesting.
Right at the start of the day, what’s one of the first things you do? Well, you put on a pair of socks of course, how hard can that be? Well, pretty hard actually because it’s really hard for me to tell which socks are a pair and which ones are odd. I used to have a nice way of avoiding this problem: I’d only buy beige socks. If all my socks were beige (which just happens to be my favourite colour) I could never put on an odd pair. I had this idea in 2008 and I kept it up for quite a while, but in 2012, for some very strange reason, beige socks became very rare and now I can never find any. In fact, I wrote about this sock trouble a little once before. Sometimes I’m told by people that I’m wearing odd socks, and these are people who know why I’m wearing odd socks, so I can’t help but wonder what exactly it is they want me to do with that piece of information.
Another thing is that I find some DVDs so hard to use. Occasionally the cursor on the menu is a very similar colour to the background, and so I can sometimes get completely lost when trying to navigate around DVDs that have large menus. So, when this happens I’ll just ask somebody else to do it for me. You’d think I could just mentally determine how many clicks are needed, but often the DVD player will miss a button press and, if that did happen I’d have no way of knowing.
The biggest problem comes when trying to create creating visual art. As I’m sure all regular readers will know, I keep a webcomic which is mostly photography based but I occasionally need to illustrate things. I use the computer programme Paint because when you hover over one of the colours, it tells you what colour it is. This is enormously helpful. The problem is, sometimes the colour I want isn’t there, so then I write ‘Blue’ into Google Images (yes, that’s right, Paint doesn’t have blue as a default), copy and paste something from there and then use the ‘pipette’ tool to extract the colour. I know what colours things are, but I can’t identify different colours easily..
And that’s about it really. I don’t like it when people use colour as the main way to describe things, though, I understand that that is sometimes the easiest way. For example when people don’t know somebody they might say “that brown haired person” to describe them I might struggle to understand who they mean. If I really try, I can usually identify a colour when I’m looking at it, but it’ll take a little while, and I can’t really do it well from memory, plus, unless I make the conscious effort to identify the colour of something, I’ll just never register it. They’re all minor things, but I know some people are interested in this kind of thing, so, I hope this blog entry, too, was interesting.
(Don’t miss my latest article for Avoid Drowning, which is actually a companion to this entry, being about colour-blindness in video games.)
(Don’t miss my latest article for Rice Digital. It is about the arcade era of Donkey Kong games.)
(Finally, don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)
