color deficiency
d gray
I am considering studying to be a civil engineer. I have a mild visual
color deficiency, mostly red/green. Do you think this would keep me from
being a civil engineer and why or why not? Any info/advice is welcomed.
Regards,
Dustin Gray
Philip
be any problem at all.
If u are doing soil testing, you may be requried to visually inspect the
soil samples. This is where color is invloved. But then its such a minor
issue.
If u are specializing in environmental eng, where chemistry tests need to be
done, u may need to identify color. But with spectrophotometers and ICP
nowadays, who needs to do that!
"d gray" <gray...@home.com> wrote in message
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Villanueva
design for the past 15 years.
Albert
d gray <gray...@home.com> wrote in message
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Dennis Novak
> I am considering studying to be a civil engineer. I have a mild visual
> color deficiency, mostly red/green.
I have red-green color blindness nd am a civil engineer. It
hasn't stood in my way a bit, although it is a minor nuisance to
have difficulty telling between red and green pencils.
Now when it comes time to wire my home network, figuring out the
colored spaghetti is a nightmare. ;-)
Dennis Novak, P.E.
C.M.German
misunderstanding of what the names of the colors are. A draftsman/eng tech I
employed once was 'color blind' but he never seemed to have any problems with any
of the work. I see it as a matter of knowing and understanding your abilities.
Charles M. German
James Robinson
>
> I've never really understood color 'blindness'. I figured it's just a
> misunderstanding of what the names of the colors are.
Color blindness is perhaps too strong a description. Other languages
use the more general phrase "color classification" or "Daltonism", after
John Dalton, who published some of the earliest papers describing the
affliction.
Most people who are color blind inherited the affliction genetically
from birth. It is like hemophilia, in that it is a defective recessive
gene that is carried from a person's grandfather through their mother's
genes. It can also, however, develop later in life from diabetes or
certain drug use. It can even develop temporarily following some
diseases. By far the majority of color blind people are males, about 1
in 20 of the population, but females can also be afflicted, at a rate of
about 1 in 200 of the population.
While the cause can be traced genetically, the result is that the
pigments necessary to distinguish color are not present or are not
functioning normally in a person's retina. This means that the person
has trouble distinguishing between certain colors. By far the most
common type of color blindness is red-green, where red and green are not
seen as brightly as they would be seen by a person with normal vision.
The extent of the problem will vary from person to person, but generally
they will be able to discern the difference between pure colors, yet
will have difficulty differentiating red, green, and brown when the
colors are very dark or pastel, or when they are dimly lit. Another
example of the problem might be discerning a pastel pink from blue,
since the red portion of the pink would not stand out. (Is that a boy or
a girl?) Interestingly enough, most color blind people can set proper
color balance in photography or on color TVs, if they go about trying
to, but may tolerate settings that would drive people with normal color
vision crazy.
A person with normal vision can understand the problem to a certain
extent by imagining that strawberries are brown. If you were trying to
find them in a field, you would have great difficulty in that the color
would not stand out among the leaves and shadows to the extent that it
would if the berries were red. Once you find them, however, you would
have little difficulty in seeing they were brown. A red berry to a
color blind person is just about as bright as a brown berry is to a
person with normal vision.
There are also some people who cannot see blue, but that tends to be
rare. It is also very rare for a color blind person to not be able to
see at least some red or green, like about 1 in 100,000 people. Even
more rare is a complete lack of color perception of any type.
> A draftsman/eng tech I employed once was 'color blind' but he never
> seemed to have any problems with any of the work. I see it as a
> matter of knowing and understanding your abilities.
Most color blind people will know when they are looking at a color that
will give them trouble, and they will often compensate by not naming the
color, instead referring to the position of something or pointing it out
directly. They can also compensate by moving what they are looking at
into an area with brighter lights where they will see it more clearly,
or if they have the choice of colors, picking ones that they can easily
tell apart.
One important thing for people with normal color vision to remember is
that there is a significant part of the population that has problems
seeing colors, like one in twenty people. Where colors are being
selected for identification or emphasis, they should be chosen such that
they are colors that color blind people can readily see and
differentiate. This can be important in areas of safety, web page
design, forms, presentations, maps, assembly instructions, and so on.
C.M.German
Thanks for the very interesting reply. I now know for sure that I am NOT
color blind! ;>)
James Robinson wrote:
--
Charles M. German
C.M.GERMAN,Rls
335 Anguilla Drive
Brunswick, Georgia USA
(912) 261-8328 Voice
(912) 267-1984 Fax
James Robinson
>
> James:
>
> Thanks for the very interesting reply. I now know for sure that I am NOT
> color blind! ;>)
For those who are interested, here is a link to a discussion about color
vision, including some examples of professions that would be difficult
for people with defective color vision, (civil engineering isn't one of
them) and examples of the color tests that are available and how they
were developed:
http://home.earthlink.net/~glndelaw/color.htm
Here is a web site that discusses the selection of appropriate colors
for web pages. It includes a simulation of how colors would look if you
were color blind, and also includes links to various sites where you can
test yourself to see if your vision is normal. Be careful of the link to
the common Ishihara test, as the columns in the table showing the
answers under the test are goofed up, but knowing that you should be
able to sort them out: