Being color blind

I've been working on a book in the past couple of months and amongst my responsibilities is selecting a cover and deciding on the general look of my book. Being artistically challenged, it's not exactly one of my favourite processes but I have to deal with it anyway.

This morning, my boss came up to me and told me: "We've decided on the color of your book!"

Now, normally I'm no happy camper when someone takes such decisions off my hands. Not in this case. When you're colour blind, it's not so much of a big deal!

Quite a while back, when people realised I had colour issues, I would claim I wasn't colour blind, but had Colour Identification Deficiency Syndrome, or CIDS for short. I made it up because there's a lot of misconceptions about color blindness, the most common is that anyone who's colour blind sees the world in black and white (maybe with shades of gray).

Now while this can definitely happen (it's called Achromatopsia) but it's not the case for a majority of colour blind. For most of us it's a case of colour differentiation. I can see colours, it's just not as clear-cut as it is to others. I've always thought that the term colour blind was too much of a generalisation simply because I wasn't blind per se when it comes to colours. But when it comes to the following kind of test, well....

Apparently you can find either a dog, balloon, boat or an honest-to-goodness car in there!

As result, i don't do such terms as 'Navy blue' or 'Magenta'. Just the basics will do nicely thank you. And I don't give directions referencing building colour either. Where my career was concerned, I was forced to rule out early in my life such options as pilots and numerous types of cool scientific work. As of to date, there's no real cure for colour blindness.

Incidentally, all this while until recently I thought that women could never have these colour issues. Now I know it's possible, except that it's a lot rarer than men. Plus I always find it funny when people who aren't colour blind people have a dispute with regards to what colour something is.

My wife, Raudha continues to ask me questions like whether her scarf matches the rest of her outfit. I continue to answer. The answer is typically met with a "Yeah right" style of response. But she continues to ask me....