Visual Impairment

The first topic I want to touch on is Visual Impairment. It affects billions of people around the world in many different ways. However, if you ask people what first comes to mind when they think of visual impairment, they will often answer short/long sightedness. Whilst this is still a large issue, many other forms of impairment go unnoticed by the general public. Furthermore, many people don’t even know they have any eyesight issues as they don’t often take part in regular eye tests. This is even true for myself, as it was only until I was 10 years old when I was told about my red/green colour blindness.

In this section I want to look at visual impairment by looking deeply at colour blindness and the process they use to diagnose it. I will also then look at finding interesting and unique ways to raise awareness to different forms of visual impairment to encourage people to go and have an eye test.

Below is a series of photos comparing what “normal” people see versus what I see. I took these photos using an app on my phone that simulates colour blindness. It can be quite difficult to visualise what I see, as I cannot compare it back to the original, but I believe this does a good job. As you can see, my colour blindness results in the vibrant reds become slightly desaturated and oranges appear more similar to yellow.

Whilst these changes don’t effect my day to day life, it does effect me when there is an orange colour (that appears green to me), next to a green colour which is a similar shade. An example of this is when I play softball. The ball was a murky brown colour (which appeared much greener to me), but when it was placed on the ground, it became invisible amongst the grass.