Tag Archives: colour blind

Because I’ve written in the past about my son’s colour blindness, I do get a lot of search engine queries about it at this blog. Questions relating to whether or not their child is colour blind. I’ve been meaning to share a few links that have helped me for a while now, and spending time at a parenting forum today, talking to another mum who was wanting to know, has prompted me to write this now.

Obviously, once I had reason to believe my son was colour blind, we had an opthalmologist confirm it (he had an appointment in a month’s time anyway, so we just waited until then to confim what we already by now knew). An optometrist would also suffice, we just went to an opthalmologist because he sees one regularly for other vision problems anyway.

You can always check if a child knows their colours by showing each colour separately. My son, although colour blind, can recognise every colour most of the time if they are not next to another colour. Trying to distinguish colours that are side by side is where the confusion sets in. So, once you’ve had a look at how your child handles separate colours, put some together and see how they go. My son was incredibly frustrated when I tried him with this!

There’s also some good tests you can do on the internet as you’re waiting for an optometrist’s appointment:

This one is good for kids who don’t yet know how to read numbers; it just features shapes

Your child will need to know how to read numbers for this one

There were two other good tests I found when I was checking my son out, and frustratingly, I can’t find them now! If/when I do, I’ll edit them into this blog post for you. If your child appears colour blind from one test, it’s natural to want to try a few other tests as well. Please, don’t ever hand over money for online colour blindness tests! There are plenty of free ones that will give you the answers. If you’re going to spend any money on this, it should be at the optometrist.

Here’s a tool that has helped me to familiarise myself with my son’s colour blindness: a colour filter. I used this when I created this blog post, showing how non-ripe bananas look to my son.

Colour blindness filter

Note: if your child has colour blindness, both pictures will look identical to them.

I had a quick play with it just now, to show you how I look to everyone else (left) and how I look to my son (right)

Seeing how my son views people had led me to a theory about why he loves zombies so much. I decided to put a Plants vs Zombies character through the colour filter, and as you can see, there is really very little difference!

As I mentioned in my first post about his colour blindness, his drawings were a dead giveaway to his teacher! Don’t they look like zombies too?

Story book characters from ‘Titch’, through my son’s eyes

There are other things my son’s colour blindness affects, so if you’re not sure if your child is colour blind, see if any of these sound familiar:

- can’t understand why he can’t eat a green banana no matter how much you explain it to him. (They both look yellow if you are colour blind)

- can’t make out red trees from green in Autumn

- struggles to make out colours on a map.

I also came across this link which will make any computer games-mad colour blind child happy:

Pop Cap games which provide a colour blind mode

I hope this is helpful to those who are looking! If you have any more resources you have found helpful or might help someone else relating to colour blindness, please feel welcome to share them in the comments below.

Story book characters from 'Titch', through my son's eyes

My son is five years old, bright and alert. Today I finally worked out that he is, indeed, colour blind. I’ve always suspected this, been on the lookout for it, as my maternal grandfather had it as well.

When he was little, I thought he was slow to learn his colours. I thought he hated drawing because he simply couldn’t sit still and was full of energy. I tried to use online colour blindness tests when he was two and a half and when he got every question wrong, I was unsure. Is he too young to understand the question? Am I expecting too much from him simply because his older sister is gifted and did all these things early? Is he not getting the answers right because he doesn’t have the attention span at this age?

Almost every food I’ve presented to him over the years, with the exception of sandwiches, fruit and veges, has been met with, ‘I’m not eating that! It looks disgusting.’ This is a phase, I thought. He’ll grow out of the picky stage. Yet his pickiness during his picky stage was so much more picky than my two girls were when going through that stage. It also lasted a lot longer. Now I’m learning that this can be common in young children with colour blindness, because to some of them,  a lot of food looks like poo.

He started to name colours correctly last year, around the same time as his three year old sister, who picked it up much faster. ‘She must be more advanced than him,’ I thought. ‘Go easy on him, you can’t expect all your kids to perform at the same level.’ He could name all the colours, but sometimes he would double-check with me to clarify his doubts. He started to show a little more interest in drawing and writing last year, always choosing very bland colours. The child-care worker in me didn’t flinch; it’s important to let children express themselves with any colour they choose, isn’t it?

I’m so glad we’ve moved to a town with such a small school, where issues such as this are picked up so much more quickly than in a crowded one. His teacher mentioned her concerns about his use of colour. Saying that sometimes he’ll choose the right colour, and sometimes he won’t. She asked if he was colour blind.

This afternoon, I decided to investigate. He has an opthalmologist appointment next month for his glasses wearing, so I definitely intend to get him thoroughly checked out then, too. I held out a bunch of textas in front of him. Now, my son is at a stage where he likes to show off what he can do: reading, writing, counting, skipping, anything. I asked him to pull out the brown texta. He pulled out the purple one, threw it angrily at me, and said, ‘I don’t want to play this game!’ and stormed off. I gently called him back. I mixed up the textas again, and asked for the red. He put his hand on the bright orange one, paused, then pulled out the red, then furious with me, threw it on the floor. He pulled out the green texta with no problems.

This was confusing. He did seem to know his colours mostly, but there was obviously confusion. I decided to revisit Mr Google. Back to those tests I’d tried years ago when he was too little. Back then, I’d promised myself I’d test him when he was older, but he seemed to convince me he’d learned his colours, so I’d never been concerned enough at this age to go back to it. Not to mention, in the past two years, I’ve been so wrapped up in learning to manage life as a carer for my partner. His issues had been so demanding for so long.

My son was now at an age where he could do these colour blindness tests properly and I knew he’d understand the questions. He failed on every single one. I tried all different types of tests. He was/is,  most definitely colour blind. I took my partner outside and told him the news, then he asked me to try just putting two colours together with the ‘texta test’. So, I did that, and luckily my son was asking to do more by now. It became obvious that when certain colours were together, it confused him. He started to get huffy again. I couldn’t understand how he could know red and green in some instances and not in others. So I sat on Google and did more research, and discovered that yes, it’s the combination of colours that seems to be the problem with people who are colour blind.

I asked him if he gets confused and frustrated about colours. Is it hard to work it out sometimes? He glared directly into my eyes and nodded. So, I told him about my grandfather, how he had colour blindness and what it meant. Then, I took a deep breath and told him that I think he might have colour blindness too, which is why he sometimes finds colours tricky. He  said, ‘that’s bad,’ crankily. I said, ‘but we can help you with colours now, mate, ok?’ and he seemed alright with that.

Later, he asked to do another internet test. This one lets you guess, then you click on the picture to reveal the answer, and it tells you what type of vision you have if you answered the questions a certain way. It was obvious he knew none of the answers, but the little bugger tried to guess a number for each one! I said, ‘dude! If you see nothing, say you see nothing! It’s not a guessing game.’ He grinned at me, and I realised, this kid is gonna have some fun with this…

When he saw what the correct answer was for each one, he gasped in genuine shock. ‘Aw! I didn’t see that!’ It was like we were playing a game, looking for the ghost in the 3-D picture, not testing his vision, for chrissakes. Then his three year old sister came over and gave him all the answers, and he looked at her as if she’d grown two heads. ‘How can she see all this stuff?’ So, I took another deep breath and said, ‘most people can see all this stuff, mate. You can’t, because of the colour blindness. But I’ll make sure you get any help you need, ok?’ and he seemed ok.

There’s been talk amongst us adults of what he will and won’t be able to do. Mr Google has plenty to say about his future career choices. No medical professions, science, police work, military (yay!) no flying planes, no this and no that. I remember that kid on ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, whose dream was to be a pilot and had the mother of all freak outs when he found out he was colour blind.

I decided my son doesn’t need to worry about all that right now. I’ll build him up to that when he’s a little bit older. For now, I’ll give him textas and pencils with the colours labelled on each one, and work with his teacher to make sure there are no hurdles at school or at home. When he’s older, I’ll help him to learn other ways to figure out if he’s cooked his steak properly, or if that piece of fruit is ripe, not ripe, or rotten. I’m just relieved he took it a bit better than that kid on ‘Little Miss Sunshine’.

Other Reading:

Learning the Ropes of This Colour Blindness Gig