Last week, Mac’s teacher asked me about the possibility of Mac being color blind. I told her I was waiting for that to come up. Mac has begun struggling with shades and confusing certain colors. I wasn’t sure at what age kids could see all shades and distinguish them. Commonly, he gets blues and purples mixed up, but then he’ll confuse oranges and greens…Anyway, with colorblindness being in the family, I wasn’t surprised when his teacher said that these were common signs and that he should, indeed, see all the shades correctly at this age. She asked if she could run him through a few basic tests, to which I was happy to say yes. While waiting, I decided to pull up a few sites that had color blindness tests and have Mac look at them.
I had this box up on the computer and I was reading the instructions (to know what I should see and what he should see) when he walked up and said, “It says, ‘No’.”
I told him, “No, I’m reading what you should see.” He kept insisting that it said, ‘No’.
“Where? Point to it, Mac.” Getting slightly exasperated that he was trying to take the test before I gave him the instructions.
“Look, Mom, N-O.” while pointing to a bunch of random dots.
Then I got a chance to read the instructions.
I then gave him all the tests I could find online and he ‘passed’ each one for color blindness. He gave the ‘colorblind’ answer for each picture. The research was interesting. With Nate being color blind, I always wonder what the world looks like to him. I mean, I can’t imagine not seeing all the beautiful greens and colors of the grass, trees and flowers. These sites gave great pictures of what ‘color vision deficient’ individuals see. It’s not as bad as I imagined, so I guess Mac will be just fine, despite his disability. 🙂
I’d be curious to see those pictures you mentioned that show what color-blind people see. What sites did you find them on?