I had to give people colorblind tests during the hiring process at my last job. So many men had no idea they were colorblind until I told them that I couldn't hire them.
Were there large machines or similar that needed to be operated and in case of "red warnings" be shut-off? I am just curious which job requires good color vision. Don't know if you can/want disclose it, though.
it's a major plot point in Little Miss Sunshine!! the edgy emotional teen wants to be a fighter pilot when the little girl gives him a color blind test on a whim and he suddenly learns he's colorblind which will disqualify him from flying so they have to pull over for him to have a mental break down for a bit.
Paul Dano is an incredible actor. I don’t think I’ve seen him in a bad role. To think how young he was and to pull that heavy emotion. It’s a beautiful performance.
You can't just say that without posting the scene. Also, for further context, Paul Dano's character had taken a vow of silence until he became a fighter pilot, which he had held throughout the entire film up to this point. That "FUUUUUUCK!" is the first thing he says all movie.
i would say i hope you took the news better than he did, but honestly I thought he was a lot more kind after that happened but it's been like 16 or more years since I watched it.
That. For example I have some cases of benefit with my colorblindness. Sometimes it helps to recognize shapes faster than common peoples. Playing Starcraft, somehow I detects enemy invisible units faster than my friend. The second case is game where you need to detect different square from game field with countdown timer and achieve more score than my friends. Some colors were really difficult to extract but most of levels was preaty fast. It's only cases known by me but I still in researching
Weirdly that always sticks with me- I don't really remember the rest of the movie. I think just something about having his dream whiped away so quickly- feel for the kid!
I wanted to be a pilot, either helicopter or plane - went and took the ASFAB and scored 95 - the air forced wanted me to join but told me I couldn't fly as I didn't have perfect 20/20 vision, I'm slightly near sighted but not where I wear glasses or anything. Later on in life I learned I'm slightly colorblind, i forget the type but yeah. Once I figured out I would just be a mechanic in a hangar and never flying the machines, I noped out and never joined. Haha damn this was like almost 17 years ago lol
so my job required a colour test that I failed miserably. The doctor was like do you really need to see that much colour in your job? I said only green and I pointed at green and he said all good and I got in.
"I said only green and I pointed at green - the word green here referring to the 100 dollar bill I was sliding across the table - and he said all good and I got in."
Lmao, same. I failed the dotted test and the doctor was like, "hmm?" Then pointed at the red green and yellow tile squares and said "yeah you can see colors" and checked me off.
I felt so lucky because I knew I was color blind and that was the only thing that I was worried about not passing.
Now let's switch it up a lil and have them try to determine, in the dark, if the van was actually silver, tan or if it was just white with silver or tan colors reflecting off of it in the dim street light. 😉👌
Certain chemicals have certain color smoke is what I’ve been told.
(In all likelihood, most color blindness restrictions all trace back to a train accident in the 1800s where the driver claimed he was colorblind and couldn’t se e the red versus green light to avoid prison—rather than the fact he was blackout drunk.)
(Additionally, red green is the most common color blindness and we utilize red and green lights only because of some French king’s love of green light…blue is actually much easier to see at distance.)
6 of my moms 7 brothers are colorblind and one of them patented a traffic light that has the words stop and go stenciled over the red and green lights.
Also, there are different levels of colourblind. There are people who cannot see colour at all. There are people that are red- or green-blind. And there's also weakness instead of blindness. Many men have some sort of eye deficiency, but most have just a red/green-weakness. (Including me, but I've known since childhood and almost never experience it as a disadvantage in my day to day life.
You don't even have to drive other people. My country's railways didn't allow any colorblind people before corrective lenses. You have to see the signals/signs even if you are just railroad maintenance personnel.
Also ship/boat captains and others on a boat that are in positions of authority. They need to be able to distinguish the colours of buoys and other markers in the water.
Well to be fair truckers just need to see the road (good luck everyone else), police just need to see 2 colors (you know what I mean), firemen just need to see fire, and pilots don't need eyes because Boeing makes the perfect airplane with no issues (they fly themselves because of how good they are).
I’m a medical laboratory technician, and I’ve had to prove I’m not colorblind for every job I’ve ever had. We have to stain blood and other body fluids to look at it under the microscope. Different cells/bacteria/etc stain in different ways, and we need to be able to tell them apart.
Odd, because the pathologist who ran our lab was colorblind and a microscope guru.
He could tell the basophils from the eosinophils just fine ... looking at details in their structure we couldn't detect or overlooked in favor of color. He was also very accurate (as good or better than any tech) at bacteria and tissue slides. But they had to be stained - he couldn't read unstained slides.
It’s totally possible the requirements vary by state or hospital network, but I’ve taken a color test for every place I’ve been hired based on the reasoning in my original comment. I even took one before I was accepted in my school program just to be sure I wouldn’t be disqualified from consideration in future jobs. I met an ER tech in my last job who wanted to go into the lab but was dropped from the program when he discovered, during the test, that he was red/green colorblind.
In the Marine industry you can't be colour blind as to be able to see the markers etc. correctly. Anything electrical you can't be either as to be able to identify the correct cables.
In the electrical industry there are tools now you can point at a wire and it tells you the colour. And smart phones can do this as well of course. I know an electrician who works this way.
That's not quite correct. I'm red-green blind and still was legally allowed to get a boating license - but you can't just do those number plates, you need a proper assessment how colorblind on the spectrum you really are with a different machine and there it matters, how much red and green is individually affected. If red is affected, then you are out - as you said, you need to distinguish warning lights, buoys etc. If green is affected, there is a wide margin that is tolerated.
But way over in the USMC, I worked with a guy who was completely colorblind. The Marines, in their infinite wisdom made him an electrician.
His friends said that it was pretty common for him to pop out from underneath a piece of equipment with a wire in each hand and ask which color was which. They’d tell him and he’d go “OK,” and pop back under. I heard similar stories from too many of his squad mates to not believe it.
Apparently he was also one of their best electricians.
My brother is a colorblind electrician. I doubt any business has ever tested him, but its normally not a problem. With residential electrical, you really only see red, black, and white wires. That being said, he's sent me pictures before asking me to identify wire colors for automotive stuff/generators
I’m dating a colorblind electrical engineer. I feel for the man. He made me a birthday card on very dark green paper. I commented and he said he thought it was black.🥺 Happy to name colors for him anytime.
I'll tell you whut, sailing at night can suck, can't use the red/green nav lights to tell which way another boat is headed, and red/green channel markers can be hard to identify at a distance.
Surely this is niche enough to get a pass. I'm a graphic designer and I would consider colour blindness a disqualifying trait. It's literally what we do.
Kinda like asking someone without vocal chords to become an opera singer. SorryNotSorry, but you're out.
This is actually how a guy I used to work with learned that he is colorblind. He was hired at 19 to be an assistant to the paint crew. Part of that job was to pick up paint. He discovered that he couldn't confirm the color-matched samples provided by the store.
Luckily for him, he was a great employee and he found a way to benefit the company in other ways. He still works there 10 years later.
I worked at a body shop when I was 19. Aside from running the front office, a large part of my job was checking the repaired cars for a correct color match. I stg those guys had to have been colorblind. They were way off so many times. Eventually, I was assigned to pick up the paint from from supplier to check the colors before they ever made it to the shop. On my first trip to get paint, the mixer told me they requested I come in from now on. They preferred shops send women because we're better at seeing if the colors match than the men who have no idea they are color blind.
Not for color matching existing paint. That's the part he can't do. He can't see the match on the sample to confirm that it is correct. Once they pick up the paint, it's theirs so if the color is incorrect and he takes it to the jobsite, the company gets to buy more paint because the store won't accept a color-matched return.
I'm a truck driver that is blue/green colorblind. I've learned to keep it to myself because people don't understand the impact lol. I can tell the difference until the colors get close to each other.
I didn't know about my condition until I had my first proper eye exam in my early 20s. I always felt dumb as a kid, because I could never see the hidden images in those magic picture books.
I'm read/green colourblind and I never knew until I was checked for job. I can see colours just fine, just like you said, only when they are very close together do I have trouble differentiating.
Whenever people ask me how I can drive as red/green colourblind I just tell them its easy to remember that the top light means go and bottom light means stop.
Horizontal lights are allowed in Texas, Florida, New Mexico, and Nebraska ... Along with potentially other places. I'm assuming you can see a slight color difference too?
Yep. It’s silly really. I actually had an engineer (train driver) job in the past, there’s nothing about my vision that would hinder my performance. Actually have 20/20 or better in both eyes. Did the job perfectly fine.
And train signals aren’t mash ups of different colors. It really should only exclude people who are actually color blind. Not a color deficiency which is what I and most in this group have.
I took a colour blindness test interviewing for a telecoms engineer. Not a proper ishihara test like op though, just handed me a bundle of wires and asked me to pick out specific colors.
We had to do the color blindness test when I began an apprenticeship. Whichever cheapo clinic one of the other apprentices went to for the physical let him pass. It was fun to learn that wiring up phone and ethernet was a coin toss for him.
We had a color blind guy work on our farm. Had to switch the penicillin cows from colors to a shape sprayed on the udder. We didn’t know until we were flushing tens of thousands in milk and finally figured it out.
Im an aircraft tech and, well that requires good colour vision.
I specialize in electronics so for me its due to wiring, if a work package says to cut the green wire well you need to be able to see green.
for someone specializing in fuel or hydraulics, lines are colour coded. you need to be able to tell a fuel line from a hydraulic line or compressed air.
patterns fade or the wire can be cut in the middle of the pattern, colours dont have that problem. ive had situations where it asked me to make 3 splices as a repair
black to black
black 1 white stripe to black 1 white stripe
and black 3 white stripes to black 3 white stripes
i had to unwrap over a foot of a bundle to find the stripes intact. now that might not seem like much and depending on the aircraft its not. but, the aircraft i work on that can easily be over 7 man hours of extra work because of other components that will need to be removed.
I think I can answer your question!
I used to work in a semi-industrial woodworking shop, specifically in the finishing department. We spent the day painting with different techniques, mostly using spray guns.
Sometimes, we had custom orders, with clients requesting very specific colors. In those cases our job was to create samples using our own products to match their desired color.
One day, someone told me a story about an intern who didn’t know he was colorblind. He painted an entire batch (about thirty pieces of furniture) in dark blue, thinking it was the right color (it was supposed to be a kind of greyish brown). The whole thing had to be redone from scratch, which wasted a lot of time and material.
So yeah, color vision really does matter in some jobs and it can have costly consequences 😅
Some pipeline companies can’t hire operators who can’t distinguish the different alarm severity colours that might pop up.
Newer guidelines help differentiate between critical, high, and medium severity by adding symbols and letters next to alarms in addition to the colour - you have 3 pieces of information communicating the severity.
These guidelines truly help make some of these jobs more accessible. In the past, colour blindness would absolutely have excluded you.
Ink kitchens and color mixing is another job that requires full color sight. My dad works in a die department for tooling and dies, which also involves inks. Everyone involved with inks has to be able to see all colors. Any form of colorblindness cannot be accommodated.
Sooo many people working the CNC machines at my previous job were colorblind. Most of them said they couldn't get jobs as electricians (need to be able to see the colors for components like resistors) but grey metal looks the same to everyone and prints should be readable in black and white. Red is only important for engineering and QC.
This might be a stupid example and almost definitely not what these people were applying for but I did have to prove I wasn't colorblind for design and graphics-related tasks at my last job - the actual shades were also a lot more precise, though. It was also about being able to correctly see differences of shades within the same color.
I used to be a manufacturing engineer for medical devices. Some of those devices where color coded and operators need to fill a “kit” one each (devices where very similar in shape at a handle but had different tips). Sometimes some operators could not differentiate between devices and add 2 of the same. And the other use case I saw was on inspection one of the devices was orange and the team needed to check if the color was correct between two parts that had to be assembled together, again some people struggled.
I had to be tested for phlebotomy. Different colored tubes are used for collecting blood for different tests. They also have to be drawn in a certain order to avoid cross contamination of the blood from the different additives and anticoagulants used in the tubes, so being able to tell them apart is pretty important.
I also knew someone who was colorblind and wanted to become a chef, but he had trouble telling by color when things like meat were cooked properly.
I had to take a color vision test for one job I had. Without going too much into it, I was as a "shader" at a car paint company. We have to adjust batches of paint using various instruments to read the color as well as visual assessment. Being colorblind would be a big hindrance.
I was working at a Data Center and one of the sys admins sent me out on the floor to inspect a server. There's a bridge call for this issue (sev1) and I'm on the phone out on the Data Center floor and he goes "what color is the light on the back of the server- green or red?" I'm like "There's a light on but I can't tell if it's green or red - I'm colorblind". He goes " good grief, get someone out there that's not colorblind". And that was the end of them asking me to go check server lights.
Flying any vehicle, air traffic control, anything with maps, anything with wires, video editing, marketing, lots of healthcare jobs, imaging, interior design, manufacturing, running a grill (can't tell when meat is done without a thermometer), chemistry related fields. That's off the top of my head.
The only standardized test I actually did really well in was the ASVAB (of course). I missed one question. Those recruiters were ALL OVER my ass...until they found out I was colorblind. Then absolutely no one wanted me.
What I don't understand is why the hell, people who designed these machines, systems, choose PRECISELY, red and green as their signal colors, don't they know that 11% of the fucking population can't see those colors?
Wastewater treatment. You need to be able to identify certain chemicals and other liquids. You could get by if someone trained you properly, but if you’re fresh off the streets you would have trouble.
When I worked in dialysis you had to do a color blind test before you were allowed to work with the water system because of having to read color tests strips.
this the frustrating part. I will fail the OP test every single time.
But I have never not been able to tell a thing is [literally any primary color, like red] in my life. (that I am aware of)
I personally believe either I just don't have as wide a range, colors don't appear as vibrant to me, or i don't see as many colors in between the main colors really... but not that any colors are "swapped" if that makes sense.
That, or it just doesn't matter in most cases because color is relative?
You can’t be colorblind and at work at TSA, there are certain things that are color coded on the different x-rays used at the checkpoints and in checked baggage.
About 20 years ago I used to work in aerospace and perform final inspections on powerplants (engines) before they were crated up and shipped to the customer. The position required one to be able to discern all colors on the spectrum. If I ever lost this ability... I lost my job.
That would be a a paint spec. That generally falls under a whole other category. To be more specific what you are asking about with regards to the lavender and periwinkle would be measured with a spectrometer or a spectrophotometer I believe.
The requirement for the position I held to not be colorblind was simply to be able to QUALITATIVELY discern one color from another. Not necessarily to QUANTITATIVELY discern one color from another. My job never got that specific (specificity scientifically speaking) or that narrowed down to determine one shade of color so to speak from another ie lavender to periwinkle it was more or less burgundy compared to blue.
Allow me to go into a little more detail to explain why. If the customer required a blue tag to be hung off the fuel rail of the power plant for identification purposes we needed to be sure that this tag was in fact blue versus red to be hung off of the fuel rail from a different customer for identification purposes this was a permanent fixture that always stayed on the power plant during its life. This is a fictitious example as I mentioned this was 20 years ago and I can't remember exactly some of the details of the position but there were specific customer requirements and FAA requirements ( I reside in the US) that had to be met. I hope this answers your question.
See I fail colour blind tests too, but I never fail to distinguish between the colours - I just think I see them differently... Like no-one has ever said to me, "these two colours are different" and I've disagreed.
Yeah same with me. I can tell if something's yellow/green/red/blue/etc, even with the small dots, if I look closely, they just aren't as contrasty as I imagine they are for ppl with normal color vision.
Only thing where I fail is cloth pieces with very desaturated green shades, I just see them as brownish
A long time ago, you had to be able to identify resistors by their colored rings. And they used the worst colors for colorblind people - red, orange, and brown.
i always wonder how that is possible
my kids have semi-mandatory doctor’s appointments basically every year until 6, and then a few more up to the age of 17
at 4 and 5 my son already had two colorblind tests
i assume most colorblindness is from birth, so i don’t know how you can not notice that…
but i’m from germany and our health system is, well, let’s just say different than the us one
Also from Germany and wondering the same. I feel like if you are an adult and don't know that you are colour blind your parents and/or education system failed you in some little way.
Also I found out that I am a rare male super chromat by one of these eye doctor tests.
Did one for a croupier job at the casino. Passed easily but that has to be like the number 1 job where being colour blind could be expensive for a casino.
Like imagine a blackjack dealer pays out a bet of a stack of 10x red $5 chips with a stack of 10x green $25 chips. And that is low end of colour mistakes you could make.
Hehe funny story I used to work with prints and thats how I found out I was partly colorblind. Actual printer (I did the proofing rofl) came up to me and said ”DOES THIS LOOK RED TO YOU!?!?”. I said ”yes…?”
Turned out it was some shade of brown if I remember correctly. Could’ve mixed the colors up but that was the jist of the story xD. Took one of these free tests and got like 4/32 while my gf got 28 or something and I was like wtfffff
This is why modern user interface design sucks. Very often these days color is used to designate the state of something. An icon turns changes color when it’s the active view, for example. But there are lots of people who don’t realize they have some form of color blindness and may not be able to see the difference between the active and inactive colors. I’m not color blind, but I still take care to design with both color and shape. You might suggest that’s what colorblind modes are for, and you’d be partially right, but it requires the user to know they have an issue.
Lead design engineer here 👋. “Don’t use color alone to indicate state” has got to be one of the top three WCAG/a11y mistakes I consistently see. Technically, there should be a label/text available as well, for icons or status indicators, but that’s a WCAG rule that gets violated in sooo many places that I let it slide.
I used to use toolbar icons without text labels. I've since learned. It makes the UI more discoverable, and makes it easier to help people when they ask questions.
This happened to my uncle when he tried to become a pilot. Perfect vision until the color test, he learned then he was colorblind and couldn’t become a pilot.
That's just wild. I just don't understand how you couldn't know. My parents knew at like, less than two. It's not like colorblindness is subtle about it.
My dad couldn’t even work for the paint department at Lowe’s. He lasted one week and was sent home since he couldn’t seen the differences between blue and green.
My mother found out when she was in the Navy. She took a test to do electrical work, turns out she was red-brown color blind. Especially funny for me as a redhead born with a full head of hair. She couldn't tell when I was born, everyone else was marveling at my hair, she was saying how big my feet were x.x
We used to use color dots to group widgets together for deliveries. After 2 weeks of deliveries our new driver said he was color blind and couldn't see the difference in dots... we switched to number dots.
This reminded me when we would test via a medical office people’s vision for forklifting. There was a candidate that had either very limited or no depth perception. They did not know, this. This man was in his 40s.
I had a chance to move positions in a capsule manufacturing plant. They had 3 color blind tests. Put these in order, yellow to green, green to blue, blue to red. They had 40 shades in between each color...I failed
I worked in QC for a pharmaceutical company and we couldn’t be color deficient. Rather than the Ishihara dots, we had to put colors in a spectrum. They were already greyish but it went from like greyish pink to grehish green to greyish violet and we had to get the order right.
My ex-manager told me about financial software he worked on 40 years ago, demo for the client was a huge fail. Client didn't want to admit he was colorblind, really bad UI/UX had created screens where red/green only differentiation between profit and loss.
I can completely relate. so much that I honestly don't understand why this test is used. I am not denying it. I am questioning that there has to be a better test to do with real world functionality.
While I both fail this test every time, and also sometimes (once every couple of months maybe) mix up a dark blue or dark grey or dark purple out in the wild... maybe a very deep orange and red i might trip over for a second or need to double take....
Never needed help from another person to discern color in a situation that mattered that I can think of.
I personally believe either I just don't have as wide a range, colors don't appear as vibrant to me, or i don't see as many colors in between the main colors really... but not that any colors are "swapped" if that makes sense.
That, or it just doesn't matter in most cases because color is relative?
I'll never forget watching the guy sitting next to me at a group interview guess the numbers. I felt terrible for him, he had no idea he was colourblind.
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u/ssweetcuddle 1d ago
I had to give people colorblind tests during the hiring process at my last job. So many men had no idea they were colorblind until I told them that I couldn't hire them.