Living with colorblindness feels like you’re constantly being pranked by the world in subtle, irritating ways.
The other day, I was booking a flight on Kayak, trying to figure out which dates are the cheapest by looking at their low fare calendar. See any issues?
Oh, sorry — that’s what it looks like to me. You probably see it more like this.
I opened up Chrome Dev Tools, changed the cheap fare colors to something I could actually see, and eventually booked my flight. A few weeks later, I’m off to the airport. Conveniently, the parking structure added colored lights to help find empty parking spots. Or so they say? They all look the same to me.
Airport parking garage at PDX. Move slider to the left to see what Andy Baio sees.
It took me a little longer, but I found a parking spot. Waiting at the gate, maybe I’ll kill some time on my phone. But why is this photo of an ordinary chili pepper at the top of Reddit? Or this leaf? Oh, right.
Move slider to the left to see what Andy Baio sees. u/iesvy on Reddit
For some people, colorblindness is a serious liability that closes doors on career dreams. It’s hard to become a pilot, train conductor, or pathologist if you can’t differentiate colors in critical instruments, signals, or tissue samples. For others, it seriously impacts their day-to-day ability to do their jobs, like surveyors spotting flags, doctors looking at skin conditions, or electricians looking for colored wires.
But for me, it’s just a lifelong series of unnecessarily confusing interactions, demonstrating that the world wasn’t designed for people like me.
There are an estimated 350 million colorblind people in the world. About 8 percent of men, roughly 1 in 12, have some form of color vision deficiency. (It’s hereditary, so figures will vary from region to region.) My mom’s color vision is even worse than mine, which is very unusual: only about 0.5 percent of women globally are colorblind, about 1 in 200.
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