People living with color blindness face many challenges in everyday life that normally sighted people may not realize. Tasks that seem simple and thoughtlessly repetitive to others can be difficult for those with a vision impairment. Difficulty with things such as cooking, picking out clothes, school, and careers are all ways color blindness affects daily life.
Cooking
Cooking is one of the most obvious setbacks for people with a color vision impairment. Picking the right food can be difficult in situations when different foods look very similar, such as cauliflower and broccoli. Other challenges also exist when dealing with fruits as a color-blind person, like distinguishing between ripe or green tomatoes and bananas. These difficulties may merely result in a bad-tasting dish or a shocking flavor when you were expecting a different one, but cooking meat can present a dangerous risk. If one cannot tell the difference between a raw steak or a safely cooked steak, the result can be food poisoning. Thankfully, meat thermometers can aid in this struggle to determine if meat has reached a safe, consumable temperature.
Clothing
For normally sighted people, picking out clothes every day is nearly a thoughtless task. For colorblind people, picking out clothes presents a challenge of determining what color clothing items are as well as being able to put those items together into a coordinating outfit. To account for this, a color-blind person may need to label their clothes to know which pieces are which colors.
School
Schooling can be a very difficult part of daily life, especially in early years, when much of the curriculum revolves around colors and imagery. In later years, viewing PowerPoint presentations can become a point of difficulty based on lighting, background colors, graphics, and font colors. Having teachers modify the color-heavy curriculum to colors that the vision impaired student can see best can allay school-related difficulties that can ultimately deter a student’s learning.
Careers
Many jobs are affected by colorblindness. When color matching or color recognition is a main aspect of a job, a colorblind person most likely will not be the best fit for the position. Like school, job presentations and documents may not only be difficult to read based on the colors included, but they can also be difficult to prepare in a way that normally sighted people will find visually appealing.
There are various ways color blindness affects daily life. Colorblind glasses can aid color-blind people in many of these tasks to negate setbacks in daily life.
