How People With Different Kinds of Colour Blindness See the World

According to data available on the most comprehensive resource about colour blindness, quite a lot of us — around 0.5% of women and 8% of men — suffer from inaccurate perceptions of colour.

A Web Site called Bright Side compared how people with different kinds of colour blindness see the world, and it turns out that most of them certainly don’t just perceive it in black and white. There are several different categories of colour blindness, but we focused on the most common ones. The results are fascinating.

A person with normal vision sees the world around them in these colors.

Deuteranomalia is the most common form of colour blindness. Around 4.63% of men suffer from it and in many cases don’t even realize. It’s clear from the photo that the colors have lost some of their brightness, especially with regard to green and red.

Protanopia is a less-widespread form of colour blindness — only around 1% of men experience it. All shades of green and red appear somewhat faded, whilst blue and yellow shades remain virtually unchanged.

Tritanopia is a very rare form of colour blindness affecting men and women to an equally small degree. Those who experience it see the world in greenish pink tones.

As for total colour blindness, it certainly exists, but it’s extremely rare: only 0.00003% of the world’s population has it.

As a reference, below are a few images with the different types of colour blindness.

Treatment

There is no treatment or cure for congenital colour blindness. It usually does not cause any significant disability. However, there are special contact lenses and glasses that may help people with color blindness tell the difference between similar colors.

There is hope on the horizon for a ‘cure’ for inherited colour vision deficiency using gene technology. This will involve injecting genetic material into the eye so is not for the faint-hearted! At the moment there have been no trials on humans but the process has been proved to work in monkeys. So, lets see... pun intended!