How do I...?

Question

How do I explain color to a color blind person? Is it even possible. My friend is color blind and I feel bad when I go to point something out and i say its color...

Answer 1

I think the best way would be to associate emotions or feelings with colors. Blue=calming, cool red=angry, exciting, fiery, etc. Think of colors like a mood ring. Or, you could always just tell your friend to check out that great pale grey car with paler grey interior and darkish headliner. Sorry, that's not very nice. Good luck.

Answer 2

If one sense is partially damaged and the person was born that way then the only way to describe that sense is to compare it to the other senses. The more senses you get involved the easer it becomes to understand.

The best arbitrary way is to use the color temperature. The basic visible colors can be remembered by picturing the multicolored clown called Roy B. Giv.

This gives you: Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, Indigo, and Violet. We can't see Infra Red, and that is the primary radiation given off by heat lamps. Ultraviolet is beyond Violet. What little we can see we call black light.

Read this article for some help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature

Red is low, for a low temperature and blue turns into white, as in white-hot. That gives you an arbitrary scale to work with.

Another way is to assign temperatures AND feelings or sounds to the colors. Blue is like the cold water, green is like the feel of new grass or the smell of a freshly cut lawn. Yellow is like looking directly into the sun. White is the crisp feel of new sheets, orange is warm, but loud like a policeman's whistle, red is even louder like the horn on a fire truck. Pink would be between yellow and red so it is more like having a fire truck drive out of the sun.

You could say that red is hot like a chili pepper, or that white is sweet like sugar, and green has that fresh clean taste of lettuce.

Or you can set a base line of gray and try to describe the colors from that base line. Brighter colors have more white in them (like green, indigo, and violet). Black would be closer to the darker colors (like red, orange, and yellow). This would be more how your friend sees color naturally; unless he suffers from a different form of color blindness. Use this article to try and find out which form of color blindness your friend has: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness

Your friend may know some of the colors, or even see them as different colors. According to the article noted above: “Color blindness almost never means complete monochromatism. In almost all cases, color blind people retain blue-yellow discrimination, and most color blind individuals are anomalous trichromats rather than complete dichromats. In practice this means that they often retain a limited discrimination along the red-green axis of color space although their ability to separate colors in this dimension is severely reduced.”

Use these Wikipedia articles to help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishihara_color_test
This is how dogs are supposed to see the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochromat
This chart might help you identify your friend’s colorblindness: http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html
Apply a modification and ask them what he sees.

Find out what form of color blindness your friend has, find out what he can see, and what he knows about what he sees. If he can see red then orange would be lighter or brighter, and yellow would be even brighter than that.

Answer 3

Theres cources he can take. There is a language that you can learn and you can speak it to him if he takes a cource and you learn the language online.