Tagged “deuteropathy”

Before I carry on with the building of the garden, I thought I'd write a little bit about deuteropathy, or what's commonly referred to as being colour blind. Deuteropathy is only one form of many colour perception issues, but they're all basically down to defects in the cones in the retina of the eye. These cones detect red, green, and blue light and it's essentially a genetic disorder that can't be cured. If you have the gene that means your cones don't work properly (or at all, in some cases) then you're stuck with it for life.

I was diagnosed quite young - eight or nine years old, as memory serves. I remember my mother being called into school after I'd done the test with the numbers hidden in the dots (it's called the Ishihara test) and she sat next to me as we did the test again. They hadn't bothered to tell me what was going on - all I knew was that I'd been pulled out of my lesson to be in an office with my mother and I thought I was in trouble for something.

I know the vast majority probably won't care about the technicalities behind the website, but there is method behind the madness and some of it is even as a result of the very things that made this site seem necessary to me in the first place.

I've spent the vast majority of my life in front of computers, one way or another. One of the first jobs I did professionally was working on accessible websites and it was the first time where my deuteropathy - my colour blindness - was actually something useful in this context. It turns out that there are standards for accessibility that websites should follow that give useful guidelines and advice on how to structure your website in order to make it easy to use for people with all sorts of disabilities. Not everyone can use a mouse, or hear audio cues, or (as in my case) visually discern screen elements easily.