Abstract:

Introduction:
Having colour vision disorder may prevent a person from engaging in certain occupations, especially when colour recognition is important either for safety or essential for the work itself. In many countries those limitations are introduced by law , although may differ in severity: in some cases the colourblind are not permitted to apply for driving or sailing license at all, while in other (e.g. in Poland) the injunction applies only to professional qualifications.
Being aware of having colour vision disorder is important not only for people with professions connected with colour-based signals (e.g. drivers or sailors) – it covers a whole spectrum of different aspects of everyday life, both professional and private. The literature gives the examples of importance of correct color recognition in the work of a cook (distinguishing between fired/cooked and raw meat or determining the ripeness of the fruits), physician (e.g. being unable to notice rash or skin lesions as well as blood in analysed samples), analytic (e.g. being unable to read color charts or maps), and so on.
Moreover, taking apart the professional aspects, some types of colourblindness may affect everyday safety – people with protanopia may see red e.g. traffic light as extinguished (black).
It’s worth mentioning that colourblindness affects the ability of distinguishing the colours properly, but not the whole sense of sight - many people are not even aware of their impairment, as it can be detected usually only on few occasions: e.g. during pre-school medical tests or while applying for driving license. But even then, due to the error of the examiner or the examining method, the colourblindness can be undetected.

Importance of colorblindness detection in education:
Having the colorblindness detected is especially important in the field of education, since this disadvantage can affect the whole didactic process. In many cases, the learning materials are color-based (charts, maps, pictures, but also e.g. chemical reagents) and are using colors which may not be distinguishable for people affected with color vision disorder. This means that the results of a student may be affected (in a negative way) by errors made due to colorblindness (e.g. student read the chart in a wrong way or used improper reagent in an experiment). If the teacher was aware of the student’s disability, it’d be possible to change the teaching materials or grading method in order to give the student equal chance and grade his work fairly.

Survey and experiment:
The main goal of this paper is to determine how colorblindness affects (now and in the past) school (and university) performance. In order to do so, a survey was conducted on a group of 26 students, who were diagnosed with various types of colorblindness. Students were to answer the questions as well as were asked to complete some simple color-based tasks (as selecting certain medicine or reagent basing only on its color).

Results:
The survey results show that almost 1/3 of the surveyed students could not provide any details on their disorder (except for being aware of its existence) and almost 90% of the interviewees (23 of 26) experienced different troubles during their educational path due to colorblindness. Moreover, the trials showed that in many cases the color palette of many objects used in school (e.g. color maps) is not suitable for the colorblind.

Keywords:

Colorblindness, learning problems, teaching problems, colors.