Friday 9 October 2009

Things looking brighter for color blind

What connects Paul Newman, Jack Nicklaus, Bing Crosby. Keanu Reeves and Prince William? Well, not much, except that they are all color blind.
It's hard to imagine how the world must look to someone who is color blind, but at least it seems normal to them.
Color blindness is the inability to perceive differences between some of the colors that others can distinguish. It is most often of genetic nature, but may also occur because of eye, nerve, or brain damage, or due to exposure to certain chemicals. Check out the wiki entry here

One of the setbacks for them, one of many it might be said, is the trouble they have reading maps. The traditional rainbow of cartographic colours – green for grass-land and trees, red for main roads and public footpaths, and blue for major road routes and rivers – can become indistinguishable, therefore making map reading extremely difficult.
Help may be on the way though, thanks to a new product from mapping agency Ordnance Survey in Britain that can be specifically styled to make mapping easier on the colour-blind eye.

OS spokesman Paul Beauchamp said: “Cartography is a fine art, but the colours that have become so familiar to most of us are actually among the worst possible choices for those with colour blindness. By using our new mapping product, called OS VectorMap Local, councils and businesses will be able to create styles especially for colour-blind people that we hope will make life easier.”

Below are two images, one of how the map would look to someone who is not color blind, the other how it would look for those with the condition.





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