Jessica Wozinsky Fleming is a writer and editor who lives in Forsyth County, Ga.
When my 7-year-old son, Everett, looks around our house, he sees the bright red Georgia Bulldogs flag on our front porch as a yellowish brown. Vibrant pink begonias in our garden are white. Inside his paint set, what looks to me like a kaleidoscope of dazzling pigments is to him a collection of murky browns, khakis, yellows and blues.
Everett has red-green color deficiency, commonly known as being colorblind. I don’t, but I recently used an app called the Chromatic Vision Simulator to glimpse how he views our surroundings. What I saw, above all, was a world without many of the color cues that the rest of us casually use to categorize, sort and learn — and that teachers use to pass information to others.
Countless students like Everett have a vision deficiency without even knowing about it. One out of every 12 boys, or people assigned male at birth, are colorblind, and 1 in 200 people assigned female at birth have the condition, too.
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Despite this prevalence, only 11 states test for colorblindness during elementary school fall vision screenings. Even ophthalmologists don’t routinely test for it. Including colorblindness screenings in those tests would be a simple move, and one that could make learning easier for thousands of American students.
In a class of 24 students, there is approximately one child who can’t see the pink marker the teacher uses on the whiteboard, who is unable to denote their team’s jerseys in gym, or who wonders why the rest of the science class is marveling over a chemical reaction that doesn’t look any different to him.
In most cases, being colorblind doesn’t mean people can’t see color, but that they see them differently. Often, certain hues — such as red and green — are indistinguishable. Studies suggest that 80 percent of classroom learning is visual, especially in elementary school, where colors play a large role. Using colors to denote specific information — such as a vivid pie chart, a color-coded map of the United States or a wrong answer marked in red — can cause colorblind students to misunderstand. Teachers and parents can support these pupils by making easy modifications. However, they need to know there’s a vision deficiency in the first place.
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According to research by a maker of color-vision glasses, many children don’t find out they’re colorblind until seventh grade, and many others are unaware into adulthood. Imagine how that can affect a child’s confidence. Scott Hanson, a colorblind principal in Cottonwood, Minn., told me he felt relieved when he discovered he was colorblind in high school. “Suddenly, I understood why I hated art class as a kid and was teased for coloring Minnesota Vikings jerseys blue instead of purple. When you’re unsure of your colors, you’re unsure of everything,” he said.
Share this articleShareWhen schools in Roanoke County, Va., started colorblindness testing in 2018, they discovered that almost 3 percent of the student population was colorblind. And many children who needed special-education services were colorblind, too. The findings made officials wonder whether the students really needed those services or whether they just had a hard time learning because of their vision deficiency.
Rohit Varma, a doctor and researcher who founded the Southern California Eye Institute and has studied color-vision deficiency in preschool-age children, says that’s the problem with not routinely testing kids for colorblindness. “From an early age, tasks that children do at school require color. When a child is confused by those tasks, it’s easy to assume that they are not intellectually able when they just see the world differently,” he says.
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Of course, school resources are stretched. But 41 states already mandate vision screenings, and including a color-vision component wouldn’t cost much. Students could even take free online tests, such as one from Enchroma, on school computers.
Many experts, including Varma, believe that because there is no treatment for colorblindness — it’s a genetic condition, after all — eye doctors don’t spend much time on it. “Yet there is so much you can do to make that child’s life more meaningful if you are aware of colorblindness and address it early on,” Varma says.
I’m thankful we caught Everett’s vision deficiency at a young age. But I worry about those kids who have no idea they’re colorblind and whom no one will advocate for because they’re unaware of the issue. If you have children who get yearly vision tests at school, ask the school nurse and administration to include color-vision testing. Someday, that quick and basic screening might be as standard as checking whether students can make out the letters on the blackboard.
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