52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 20

Week 20: Colour

A huge challenge for a red/green colour blind man, but I thought I might take you into my secret world of 1958-1975. When the rest of Australia was watching b/w transmissions, I was able to see black, white, grey and *green*, especially in cartoons! (I added some red, too, because I've come to realise that red and green are the same wavelength to my eyes.) It was a family discussion during an episode of "Happy Days" (1974, just before Australian colour test transmissions started here ) that led to this amazing revelation... that I was colour blind! Bok the Frog was drawn on cartridge paper, photocopied on various red, green and grey sheets of paper, elements cut and pasted as a collage, and the plastic overlay of grey ripples was printed by b/w photocopying the green ripples on the backing sheet onto an overhead projector plastic cel.

Bok the Frog (and his garden of croakuses) as only I would have seen him:

Week 20: Colour II

Bok the Frog (and his garden of croakuses) as *most people* would have seen him, had he been on b/w TV:

Udates:
I had a new colourful idea: Here's a miniature gesso canvas painted in acrylics by me, on behalf of a bendy, smiley man, with detail in black Unipin fine marker, and silver and gold Signo pigment ink.

Week 20: Colour III.

Dyed chicks at the Royal Easter Show, before the RSPCA complained. Fingerprint art with acrylics and a black Sharpie:

Week 20: Colour IV.

Cruelty to colourblind teacher-librarians!

Part of Term 2's pupil-free day was learning to play Speedminton. I could barely see the orange colour of the so-called "Fun Speeder" (shuttlecock), and it was even worse when it was on the grass!

Access: blog post inspires blog post!

My post of yesterday, about my colour blindness, was inspired by Snoskred's great post on Aussie Bloggers about people telling the truth, and what good blogs should include (and avoid). In turn, my blog post has inspired Craig Thomler's latest post on eGov au.

Craig asks, "Do government communications discriminate against - or for - the visually impaired?" He continues, "Despite the requirement for government in Australia to ensure our websites are accessible, I worry both that we do not do enough, and that we do too much, in this area."

I added a comment to my post, clarifying that my Curriculum Directorate colleague (at Ryde State Office of the NSW Department of Education & Training), mentioned in the post, did spread the word about my "condition" - with my permission, of course - and I became an unofficial colour evaluation guinea pig for several Units' webpage revamps for the Departmental website while I was there.

Mind you, while I was able to help them with specifications to aid my red/green colour blindness, there are other types. Where does all the beta testing end? ;) I know we tried to address numerous aspects of accessibility for the "Scan" and School Libraries web pages while I was there, and our tweaking of the book rap blogs and wikis have been ongoing. But it seems there's always so much more you can do to make a site more accessible and equitable.

That web composers are open to suggestions (and complaints) from people trying to use their site, is of paramount importance. For example, as pretty as Flash animations may be, to use only such a visual on the front page of a site can mean that people using old browsers or computers can't even progress to the page with contact details to lodge a complaint! (I've been there before!)

Thanks for the link to my blog post, Craig!

Confessions of a colourblind man

Now, I make this admission as the person who, as a kid in the 60s, had a huge argument with his parents and siblings about the eventual introduction of colour TV to Australia (it didn't arrive here until 1975). But I was able to see green on black and white cartoons all through my childhood!

The day I realised that specific tone of "green" was actually grey, was... an eye-opener. I still have very distinct memories of watching Fred Flintstone mowing his luxurious green lawn around his cave house (with an inverted prehistoric stork-looking bird as a mower, of course). But it was all an illusion.


The Flintstones - in glorious black, white and green

It certainly explained why, when colouring in, I often had to study the differences between my blue and purple pencils, my brown and black pencils, and - shudder - my green and orange pencils. (Luckily I didn't have access to grey pencils - not until I advanced to those bigger tinned sets of Lakeland Coloured Pencils in primary school.) I could spend several minutes intently comparing sky blue against violet - and end up colouring the entire sky in my picture... mauve. That happened many times. (Teachers thought I was very "creative".)

Then there was the day in 1970, when I was taken to get my eyes checked, and my first pair of glasses. That I needed glasses to improve my long sight was obvious, but the ophthalmic surgeon, and my mother, were puzzled when he asked me to tell him when a certain light changed from green to red - and I said nothing for the longest time. I was only seeing an orange light, you see, so I couldn't even work out where I was supposed to be looking. Ooops.

They didn't bother doing actual colour blindness tests on me because, as the doctor said, there is no "cure", so what was the point? With a smirk, he also said, to my mum and me, and that if only I'd been at his office a few weeks earlier. He had been given a coloured poster of a woman in a bikini. Apparently colour blind people couldn't see the bikini! (Try having that discussion in front of an eleven year old boy today and getting away with it.)

I lost my job as a golf caddy when my Dad and his golfing buddies switched to those fluoro orange golf balls in the 70s.

"Where's my ball, caddy?" my Dad's mate would say.

"I dunno", I'd scratch my head, even if the ball was at my feet!

"Help him," my Dad would tell my brother, who still claims he's not colour blind (if I recall correctly).

"I can't see it either!" my brother would say.

Yes, colour blindness often runs in the family.


Mmmm, what colour is this tee, I wonder?

My next memorably embarrassing moment was my first term at teachers college in 1977. The science lab had a rectangular poster with coloured spots which spelled out the word 'onion'. I puzzled over this sign for the whole term and, eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I asked the lecturer (in front of the class) why a poster which said 'onion' needed to be on the wall of a science lab.

"Because if you weren't colour blind," said Barry, "it would read 'color'."

I looked back at the poster, and suddenly it read 'color'. D'oh!


Please don't tell me this spot pattern says something rude...

Just when I thought I had a handle on things, my class of Year 3 students were in hysterics one day. We'd made these wonderful cut and paste patterns using two contrasting colours of Brennex paper squares (ie. school Origami paper, in many, many solid hues). I was up on a ladder pinning up their efforts, then climbed down so we could critique everyone's work from a distance. I ending up accusing some poor kid of handing me a plain sheet of paper to pin up. Her design was lime green on orange, or was it orange on lime green? Sadly, its magnificent effect was totally lost on me.

Even the green/grey problem came back to haunt me in adult life. When I was working at the State Office of the NSW DET, seconded as editor of "Scan", I had my new computer monitor set on what I assumed was the neutral grey background. It stayed that colour for many months, even after my cute "houndstooth of hounds pattern" screensaver overlay disappeared in an upgrade of our server. A colleague from another building was passing through the office and asked me if green was my favourite colour.

"Huh?" I wondered, checking my clothes and various belongings. But she was pointing to the screen I'd lived with all that time - and suddenly I could perceive it as a vivid grass green - rather the same colour as Fred Flintstone's lawn, actually!

Every now and then, colour blindness becomes a real issue when web surfing. I've had to force myself to identify many reds and greens that give me trouble, but I hate it when some web designer or blogger decides on a wonderful combination of, say lime green and funky orange, which, of course, are totally opposite on the colour wheel and should be contrasting colours, but are identical in wave length to my eyes/brain. If someone puts red-hued writing on a green background, or vice versa, I probably won't even notice the writing is there.

I have been known to have trouble with combinations such as black/brown, blue/purple and yellow/tan. To others these are combinations which are of high contrast. Similarly, some sites will have an override on their underlined hyperlinks and visited links, or they'll use colours instead of underlines, and the site becomes absolutely useless to me. Some WordPress templates/themes are terrible in this way.

Do I tell people the truth about their tricky colour combinations? Definitely, if I think it's an easily fixable problem - or if I plan to return to the site often for content reasons.

Please, have pity on the colour blind. We know not what we see.

Sunday's not so magic number: 96.9 - I'm depressed. Maybe I'll record this number in orange, on green paper? You can tell that winter's here and the early evenings are getting very nippy for dog-walking. Too many bikkies, not enough walking.