Ergonomics - iPhone Game Blueprints - page 68

• Tritanopia : The perception of blue-pair is affected. This type of color defi-
ciency causes a very strong distortion of the perceived palette of colors, red
being dominated. For instance, yellow shades are replaced with pink ones.
Its occurrence is rarer, less than 1 percent of population.
• Achromatopsia (monochromacy) : Total color blindness is an extremely
rare color vision disorder. The world looks like a monochromic image. Only
0.005 percent of the population is diagnosed with it.
It is important to note that people with any of the common forms of color vision de-
ficiencies are full-fledged members of society (in many countries, it is not an official
disability, and does not affect people's career), they are fully adapted to the world
around them, even having some advantages; for instance, people with red-green
blindness sometimes have a better talent of distinguishing patterns, they can see
camouflaged objects better. Unbelievable, but Jon Hicks —the designer who is be-
hind the drawing of the Firefox logo (he has been mentioned in this topic earlier)—is
colorblind. The following is the quote from his website:
"You see, I'm colourblind, and more specifically, I have problems distinguishing
between blue and purple, and green and brown. This is called 'red/green col-
ourblind'. I can see tones, but hold up a blue square and purple square, and I'll
probably just see 2 blue squares (handy that you had some coloured squares lying
around though) "
Neil Harbisson , an amazing man, was born with achromatopsia; he couldn't see any
colors, other than black and white. That did not prevent him from studying fine arts;
he used a monochromic pallet for his work. Then he met a student from Plymouth
University, interested in cybernetics. Together they started a project, which later be-
came popular as eyeborg, the device that helped him to catch colors, not by vision
but by hearing special sounds. The eyeborg is a sensor that converts colors into
sounds of specific tones. He can "hear the colors" around him, he even sees (or it is
better to say, listens to) colors in his dreams when he sleeps. The artist even began
to work on sound portraits; a person or an object is converted into a number of tones,
which the eyeborg generates by scanning their surfaces. Vice versa, a melody or a
speech can be converted into a color chart, so he also has some paintings of famous
sounds.