If you have a boy you should know this (but probably have no idea)

[colourcaremum]

When I found out my 7 year old son thought Father Christmas wears a brown suit I was quite tearful. Now I know yours might think the same thing too and you probably don't realise it.

Did you know that your boy has a 1 in 12 chance (8%) of being colour blind BUT he won't have been tested for it in school (they haven't been able to afford testing for years)? His teachers are very unlikely to know anything about helping him (because they aren't trained in supporting colour blind kids). So YOU, his parent, are therefore the only one responsible for getting him tested, telling the school about it, checking he can see all the information in his textbooks and making sure he gets the help he needs for GCSE's, A levels etc. and of course, making life easier for him at home. Even your boy's nursery won't have a clue -just think how demoralising it can be to be colour blind in a nursery or primary school! To see how your son's world might appear have a look at www.colourblindawareness.org and please make sure you check out your boy as soon as you can.

I would love to hear from anyone who has experiences to share about the problems of being colour blind, especially in school. Girls have a 1 in 200 chance so don't forget to have your daughters tested too!

Just to add, I hear what fearoffalling says about free eye tests and it is what you should expect to be true, but try ringing around all of your local (national chains) of opticians and you will find than some include CB test for free as a matter of course, some you have to ask for CB test and some you have to ask AND they charge for that element - the rest of the NHS eye test being free(I can name one chain specifcially).

You may, therefore, find that although you think your DS is OK, he might not be if you had your test at the specific chain I am not going to mention.

I was told (by a local optician)that my son might have a slight problem with colours BUT he has since been properly diagnosed as severely colour blind with deuteranopia. So just make sure you get the right advice.

I am thrilled to have drilled up so much interest, thanks everyone.

Please don't worry if your DS is colourblind.

My eldest is. He is 14 and we found out early on. He has no problems, well except for when I asked him if he could see the red temperature indicator in a frying pan and he hadn't a clue what I was talking about!!

He has spoken to differnt companies that offer apprentiships and they have all said the same thing. He won't have a problem in the vast majority of industries. Even being an electrician is not a problem these days.

Cloudsaway it all came flooding back to me in your post thats what happens when you pay more attention to crazy GCSE biology teacher, than your leacherous genetics lecturer at university

The school picked up on Ds being colour blind.
Both him and his younger brother who is 10 got tested at school.

Is this not so common anymore.
It would never have occured to me to have gone to the optician for a test tbh.

I read somewhere that female carriers actually have different cells in their eyes. I mean, one cell will be colour blind, the next one will be normal etc. Is that right, Cloudsaway?

Just to cheer people up a bit - my colleague is severely colour blind, but it doesn't seem to have held him back at all in a scientific career that involves a lot of identifying things by colour (I won't go into the tedious details). He just points out to people that they need to use a certain standard set of colours in their preparation of materials, not another set of colours.

Dear upahill, you are so lucky that the school picked up your DS on being colour blind. Can you say which county you are in i.e. which LEA or are you at a very forward-thinking private school?

Thanks v much - this is very important info for my research.

Good test here if your DC know their numbers. I have decreased colour perception and struggled with lots of them (my dad is colour blind), but my DSs got them all correct. :)

I was making sound cards with a pupil once, and we were doing the 'ew' sound, and the picture he had to draw to illustrate the sound was 'crew'. He drew a nice picture of a boat in lots of waves, with several sailors in random poses on the boat, with green faces. I complimented him on his creativity for thinking to make them seasick because of the waves. He looked at me oddly, but said nothing.

Of course, in the end he turned out to be colour blind (we found out a while later), and he had had no particular intention of making their faces green, had no idea that he had, and thus had had no idea where I was getting my comments about seasickness from!

It didn't cause him any other problems.

The statistic of 1 in 8 or 1 in 200 are a bit misleading, really. That might be the prevalence in the population, but it really comes down to family history. If you have a family history, your chances are much higher than that; if you don't, they are much lower. (Obviously not impossible, as aside from spontaneous mutations, there just might not have been any sons for a while, or the information about family history has been lost). Saying someone has a 1 in 8 likelihood of something tends to imply in most people's mind that it's something randomly distributed, and that it occurs by chance.

My 14 yo ds is also colour blind and it hasn't affected him so far, although it might in geography GCSE.

My db is also colour blind and yet is an RN officer, so you can have an HM Forces career with this.

Hi colourcare
I come under Lancashire Education Authority.

Also Blackburn and Darwen Unitary Authority do (did ?) tests.

I was at uni with a girl who was colour blind. She is a painter and well-respected among her peers. Not got famous yet, but she will; her paintings are fab. Colour blindness didn't stop her, she learnt how to tell red from green

OP, it is not the end of the world. Your son won't be able to fly a plane or helicopter (happened to my cousin in the army but he went on to have a fantastic career anyway), but he will be able to do pretty well anything else; it does still leave the field wide open.

Both my dc wear glasses and have been to different opticians over the past ten years. Presumably that means it's unlikely they are colour blind and it's not been picked up? Dd sometimes claims to have probs with colours.

I had a conversation about colour blindness the other day with a very geeky man.

He went into a lot of detail about how if colour blind people (red/green, not sure about other kinds) carry two small optical filters around with them then they can work out what colour things are. To be honest I didn't really understand the science behind it but might be worth googling if you think it might be useful. Obviously not practical for constant use, but for choosing an outfit, wiring a plug, or jobs that require knowing what colour something is it might help.

Thanks upahill, I will get on to them. They obviously still see the importance of testing (& tested me when I was at school many years ago).

Everyone, some colour blind people will not have issues everyday , others really struggle - it depends on the actual condition. You may know a colour blind person who doesn't have problems but there are many others who have more serious forms and they do have problems so it is not right to say that colour blindness is not a problem, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.

If you can't see your textbooks at school and the teacher doesn't realise then you will miss out on parts of your education or get questions wrong - maths (coloured graphs), science - chemistry experiments, biology textbooks, ICT - almost everything!, geography and art (obviously) - all can be a big problem.

If you have a colour blind child please ask them if they are having problems understanding everything at school and then you will know for sure how much of an issue it is going to be for them. Most colour blind children would rather keep quiet than let the rest of the class know they have a problem, especially at primary school.

"Obviously not practical for constant use, but for choosing an outfit, wiring a plug, or jobs that require knowing what colour something is it might help."

The choice of colours used in consumer mains wiring (brown, blue, yellow/green stripes) is deliberately designed to be distinguishable for people with most forms of colour blindness. Traffic lights have a lot of blue mixed into the green to make them distinguishable.

"If you can't see your textbooks"

That would be incredibly rare. Most forms of colour blindness affect distinguishing between low-saturation, low-brightness colours. So for most people with red/green blindness (overwhelmingly the most common form) a muddy mixture of red and grey would be difficult to distinguish from a muddy mixture of green and grey in a dim room, but they wouldn't have any trouble distinguishing bright red from bright green. Issues of colour blindness are routinely considered for designing computer interfaces, maps, signage and so on: it's 12% of men, and hardly something that's unknown or new.

I am going to give up on this thread now.

Unfortunately there is so much mis-information beng banded about here that it has done much more harm than good and I wish I had never started it.

All I wanted to do was to help people to think about whether their child might be colour blind and what the implications might be for them if they were. Unfortunately many of you aren't interested or are happy to make statements which are incorrect and that leave people with the wrong impression. The textbook 'incredibly rare' statement has made me really angry but what is the point of me responding with correct information if none of you want to know about it.

The whole point is that this IS a currently unrecognised SEN and the Minister for SEN has recently acknowledged this is the case and is considering colour blindness as part of the Green Paper on SEN which is due to come out this Autumn.

BUT if most of you don't want your children to benefit from your greater awareness or achieve their best in school if they are colour blind then that is up to you and there is nothing I can do about it. What a great shame for your kids though. I have done all I can here. Hopefully I have helped one or two children to have their condition regognised and if so that will be something good which has come out of this.

I am so disappointed. Sadly it seems that most mums don't know best after all, they just think they do.

Erm, one of the posters who said you were being OTT is actually an optometrist? So she might actually know best?

" The textbook 'incredibly rare' statement has made me really angry "

Gosh. Could you perhaps instead of getting angry outline the scenarios in which someone would be unable to see their textbook because of colour blindness?

tokyo,
I don't know about textbooks, but people certainly can have degrees of difficulty perceiving the difference between colours. I write graphics software, and needed to choose a set of distinguishable colours -full intensity, mostly fully saturated. I came up with a set of about a dozen which were perfectly clear to me but my male boss - who was not aware of any colour blindness as such - couldnt tell some of them apart. We had to use a smaller set and even then that was only to cater to 'normal male vision.

So it seems quite possible that there will be textbooks extant which are harder for people with one or other type of colour blindness to use - mainly in diagrams etc.

I have a nephew who couldn't tell the bright green peg from the brown peg in that Mastermind game, just the sort of apparently different colours quite likely to be used in a geography book or plant biology diagram, I'd have thought.

I heard that yellow, as a colour, stands out to people who are red/green colour defficient (like my two sons). My eldest always loved yellow and would point out yellow things when he was younger (I remember a yellow clothes hanger in a shop that he wanted).

To the person that asked how old they were when diagnosed, I think it was about 7 for the eldest and similar for the youngest. As I am short-sighted they both visited opticians from a young age.

Doesn't it get tested as part of a nomral eye test? You should be taking your kids every 2 years and its free. Mine certainly have all been tested a few times.

I clicked on this as there is red/green colour blindness in my family

It is part of normal eye test which is free under NHS. I shouldn't be such a cynic, but I notice that the website the OP refers to is a company (not for profit, admittedly) which produces and promotes colour blindness resource materials for use in the classroom, and the OP seems very keen on tackling the issue in the classroom

Of course that's a valid point, but textbooks are actually only one of several resources for learning, and I'm not sure how well a colour-blindness-friendly textbook would adequately cope with a condition that varies very widely indeed. Expensive textbooks I'd have thought.

" just the sort of apparently different colours quite likely to be used in a geography book or plant biology diagram, I'd have thought."

Except diagrams in black and white have a history as old as time itself, and unless the publishers have managed to find an exactly matching pair of colours, they will be distinguishable in tone if not in hue. Yes, if a textbook did something insane, like using colours in a diagram but simply naming them in the legend, that might be a problem

But this is hardly a new problem. The OP is writing as though colour blindness is some sort of shocking new discovery of which no-one has heard before. It's why mains cables are coded as they are. It's why the particular set of colours used for Cat5 cabling are what they are. It's the reason blue's mixed into green traffic lights. It's why they screen pilots and train drivers. It's why the colours on resistors are carefully chosen. It's why the palette of colours used to identify ammunition is so odd. It's a known problem.

Colourcaremum

You have set up quite a nice website.

You have set up a CIC recently.

You have gone to a lot of trouble to bring this issue out.

You've had a relatively interested hearing on this thread.

Then you have walked out rather crossly.

I don't understand why you would do this if it is your life's work. You have the ear of mothers all over the country - but one thread, one tiny piece of confrontation and you are off.

Are you a pro or an amateur at this stuff?

I would sincerely like you to be a pro, come back, say you were having a crap afternoon and have another go at this dialogue.

You will be listened to - but in the way of this site - which critical and often very knowledgeable.

Definitely urge you to have a second go.