Colorblind: No cure, but strategies to cope
In a recent article in the Toledo Blade, Shayleigh Frank interviews the Colorblind Association in this extremely interesting article!
Introductory Summary
“To most people, traffic lights seem like a simple red, green, and yellow signal system, informing motorists when to stop and go to allow traffic to flow safely.
But what if that green light looked blue? Or what if you couldn’t distinguish those colors at all?
“Stop lights have always been a tricky thing for people who are colorblind. Often times if you’ve got issues in certain areas like where greens and yellows are hard to distinguish if they’re by themselves, there’s a number of things out there that are a little more of a challenge if you’re colorblind,” said Paul Born who is colorblind and serves as the executive director of the Colorblind Association, founded in 2010.
As an individual who was born colorblind, Born knows first hand the daily challenges that can come from this typically genetic disorder. He said that the issue is caused by the cones in the iris not allowing an individual to distinguish colors.
“The term colorblind or color vision deficiency is really a term used when people cannot distinguish certain types of colors because the cause is typically genetic. But the cones in their eyes typically do not allow them to distinguish colors as they would in a normal-sighted person,” Born said.
Born was diagnosed at an early age, which is common for this type of disorder. Typically, around eight percent of men are affected by some form of colorblindness and only 0.5 percent of women are impacted.
“That’s because of how it is caused and it is really caused by the X chromosome in most cases,” Born said. “It’s typically passed on through women, through the genetic paths. So if you say your grandfather is [colorblind] and his son isn’t, like for me I am [colorblind] and none of my kids are but I’m assuming that there is a potential for my daughter to pass it on to future generations.””
See the full article at:
