Chapter 5: Color For All


        Because I have color blindness I thought that I would never see colors the same as other people. That changed when I heard about color blindness correction glasses. The glasses are produced by Enchroma company. EnChroma is a Berkeley, California company that emerged out of an NIH SBIR grant designed to study the feasibility of enhancing color vision in humans. The company is selling the glasses worldwide, and anyone can buy them online. The glasses' prices range between $300 to $700.

How does it work:
        The glasses' lenses look ordinary and the frames also look like other glasses, and when you wear them, they will appear like any stylish sunglasses. However, when a colorblind person wears them, they will be different than other glasses. Actually the world will look different with colors and the colorful objects, such as flowers, colorful paint and fabrics, food, and traffic signs suddenly “pop” with a heightened purity and intensity. That is because the glasses contain one or more sharp “cutouts” in the visible spectrum. To make a lens that helps with red-green color blindness, "the notch filtering occurs primarily in the spectral region corresponding to the maximum overlap between the red and green photopigments. Effectively, this drives a kind of wedge between the Red cone and Green cone signals, thus improving the separation of their signals and providing better color vision to the deficient observer" (Enchroma).

Is it a cure?
        The glasses are not a cure for the color blindness. Like any eyeglass product, they are an optical assistive device. The glasses are a fascinating solution for color blindness and could impact a lot of people who have color vision deficiency worldwide. 

References: 

http://www.enchroma.com