A NEGLECTED CHALLENGE OF BUSINESS -
COLORBLIND/CVD
By Arlene
Evans
“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.