A Neglected Challenge of Business
"Innumerable Web sites and charts and graphs used in business
are just mush to me," said Jim Doane. Font colors and background
colors make the reading impossible for Doane.
He is one of the two in one hundred males (and rare females) who
is severely affected by color vision deficiency (CVD) or
colorblindness. He, like most people so affected, does see blue
and yellow, so he is not "blind" to color.
Web developer Ed Nolan keeps people like Doane in mind. He has
an unusual occupation, especially for someone with CVD. Nolan is
one of the 1:12 males affected (1:200 females are affected) by
CVD. Although not as severely affected as Doane, Nolan can tell
red from green; however, he remembers coloring a picture of a
boy green when he was in elementary school. "It looked tan to
me," he said. As a Web developer, Nolan works with colors every
day, which he does numerically. "What might look the same or
very similar to me may be worlds apart numerically," he said.
An engineer, Doane said his secretary marks colorful charts and
grafts with the name of the color. "Then I know what people are
talking about before I went to a meeting," he said.
Doane said he had a map in front of him, "I'm working on a
project to integrate the water projects of two towns and the
whole darn thing is color coded. I had to have somebody go thru
it and mark all the lines with their color names. What I found,
though, is that even people with good color vision have trouble
sometimes because the people making the lines don't do a very
good job with contrast."
Doane is a volunteer on the board of the joint water commission
in his county. He said, "They've been very good about
accommodating me -- not only are the lines in color, they also
have symbolic representation like an X or an O. So when they
make a presentation to me, I can figure out what they mean. I
know it's been a struggle for them, because what I see is
absolutely incomprehensible to them, but they've been very good
to me. They do know what I can see now." When he first started
working, Doane says people dressed conservatively. "My wife
embroidered everything with dots," he said. "So items with one
dot went together and items with two dots went together. And
everything with three dots went together. In the years we've
been married, she went from that to buying me clothes she
thought were outlandish and I thought were pretty dull. Now I
buy clothes myself from one particular salesperson."
Deliberately playing tricks on him because of his color vision
is something else Jim has had to contend with. He said
co-workers have created colorful graphs, then laughed at his
discomfort when he couldn't absorb information. He wished they'd
find another form of amusement.
"My colorblindness didn't bother me much on the job until the
mid '80s when people started getting color copiers. Then they
felt obligated to use all 256,000 colors," he said. That isn't
the only modern convenience that bothers him. "Some power point
presentations have a laser pointer, which I can't see."
If you have any questions about what a person with
colorblindness can or cannot see, remember there are many
degrees of CVD. Asking would be the best course of action,
whether or not you know someone like Doane or Nolan is in your
audience.
About the author:
A former school nurse, Arlene Evans became interested in CVD
when she realized how common it is the challenges people face
because of the condition. When she could find no literature for
children or teens regarding this disorder, she wrote Seeing
Color: It's My Rainbow, Too for children and Color is in the eye
of the Beholder for teens and adults. Her website is:
www.CVDbooks.com.