About 8% of Πll men and about 0.5% of all women are suffering from color blindness (colour vision deficiency). This means chances that your neighbour or one of your classmates is colorblind are very high.
To put the percentages into perspective – there are close to 300 million people who are colorblind and struggle every day.
99% of all colorblind people are suffering from red-green color blindness.
Interestingly the number affected varies among groups. Isolated communities with a restricted gene pool sometimes produce high proportions of color blindness, including the less usual types. Examples include rural Finland, Hungary, and some of the Scottish islands. By contrast in sub-Saharan Africa there are few colour blind people. Countries such as India and Brazil have a relatively high incidence of colour vision deficients because of the large numbers of people with mixed race genes in their genetic history.
In the United States, about 7 percent of the male populationβor about 10.5 million menβand 0.4 percent of the female population either cannot distinguish red from green, or see red and green differently from how others do. More than 95 percent of all variations in human color vision involve the red and green receptors in male eyes. It is very rare for males or females to be “blind” to the blue end of the spectrum.
The 8% of colour blind men can be divided approximately into 1% deuteranopes, 1% protanopes, 1% protanomalous and 5% deuteranomalous. Approximately half of colour blind people will have a mild anomalous deficiency, the other 50% have moderate or severe anomalous conditions.
Numbers of tritanopes/tritanomalous people and achromats is very small, perhaps 1 in 30-50,000 people.
Reliable statistics for people with an acquired form of colour vision deficiency are difficult to find but as many as 3% of the population could be affected because age-related deficiency is relatively common in the over 65s and therefore on the increase in the developed countries due to the rising numbers of elderly people per capita.
Hi,
Nice article but…
(a) what is the purpose of the boxes with the named colors all in different colours.
(b) what is “magenta”???? The same applies for “purple”???
I would also posit that a lot of color-blind people see colors differently or see the constituent parts of a color. In nature there is no such thing as a true color and we have social aspects to what is color: For example in Australia “white” is more “White” if it has a small tinge of yellow in it whereas in the UK they prefer a small tinge of blue. Color-blind people can see the difference….
You can notice that in these boxes there are different named colors and they slightly change depending on which box you are looking at
They try to represent, as close as possible, how color blind people (depending on the type of colorblindness) see the colors
On another note, you are right about the social aspect of colors but this is as close as it gets and it can give you an idea π
SOOO..
To be clear,
there are 8% of men in Britain that are color blind and 0.5% of women in Britain that are color blind?
What about the United States? How many color blind people are there?
Hi there,
I couldn’t find exact statistics made in the United States but I found the following statement:
In the United States it affects one in every 12 males and less than one in every 200 females.