Most of us see the world in color. And we enjoy seeing the red roses and green grass. But have you wondered why some people can’t? Those people are color blind.
According to the article “Color Blindness” by Gretchyn Bailey, posted on the All about vision website, color blindness is not a form of blindness, but a deficiency in the way you see color. People with color blindness have difficulty distinguishing certain color such as blue from yellow or red from green. Red-green color deficiency is the most common form of color blindness.
People with color blindness face challenges daily like picking their food, gardening, driving cars, and selecting their clothing. The Allaboutvision website says that many people with color blindness often mistake unripe bananas for ripe ones because they can’t tell the difference between a ripe yellow and an unripe green one.
Algebra 2 teacher Mr. Suarez, who has red-green deficiency, said, “I always run red lights so it’s difficult to drive on the street!”
Mr. Ceballos, a chemistry teacher who has black-blue deficiency, didn’t know until he was in high school. “I have to be careful picking clothes especially dark colors,” he said.
According to the website Color Blindness Awareness, this condition results from an absence of color-sensitive pigment in the cone cells of the retina, the nerve layer at the back of the eye.
Color blindness is something you are born with, but there have been a few cases were people acquired this from a long term disease. Many people don’t know they are color blind until they are older.
Mr. Suarez didn’t know he was color blind until he was 11years old when he had an eye exam. “Since I was a little kid I had trouble playing video games because I couldn’t distinguish the colors,” he said
According to the website Color Blind Awareness, color blindness or CDV affects approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women in the world. So, this means that there are approximately 2.7 million color blind people, most of whom are male.

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