Minor disability discrimination

BobBob21

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I'm colourblind, red/green to be specific though that means I struggle with non-primary colours that include these colours eg blue v purple, and whilst I cannot say its comparable to being in a wheelchair etc it does annoy me how so many people and companies don't consider how a little change in their processes could make my life so much easier.

Take an item of clothing I was looking at the other day, it's colour was "apple". Now apples come in both red and green colour but by simply calling it apple I cannot distinguish which of the two it is. If you're in a store and ask someone then half the time they give you a very odd look even though you've explained your colourblind or if its online then you've the pain of having to email or find someone else to look at the photo. The other day when asking a company what something was (Googling the name of the colour used said it was a fruit that can be blue or purple) and they replied it was a "blueberry" colour, I replied saying "so you mean its purple then?" and they gave a slightly snotty "yes, that's why we said blueberry".

Then at work rather than putting a status field on rows of data people decide to colour code the rows instead so most the time I know things are going really well (green) or really badly (red) but I'm just not sure which.

So......

1) Please be considerate :(

2) Any other minor disabilities out there which minor adjustments could make your life so much easier?
 
Serious question, how do you deal with traffic lights?
 
Serious question, how do you deal with traffic lights?
A) Top, middle, bottom

B) Not all shades of green/red cause the same problems and the chosen red/green in the UK don't look the same to me

There are occasions when going downhill at night when certain streetlights can appear like traffic lights though which has caused a close call or two.
 
Sounds like a good topic for some tweets
 
It's just part of life. I'm part of a invisible minority that actually forms 10% of society, yet we get no allowance or understanding or our condition - left handedness.

Guaranteed people will laugh, but I'm only half tongue in cheek on this. It is a right handed world, even little things like the touch point for Oyster cards being on the right of tube barriers is a pain, and I bet the designer was right handed and never even gave a thought about it. And don't get me started on corkscrews, tin openers, scissors etc :mad::nono:

But we smile and get on with it :)
 
It's just part of life. I'm part of a invisible minority that actually forms 10% of society, yet we get no allowance or understanding or our condition - left handedness.

Guaranteed people will laugh, but I'm only half tongue in cheek on this. It is a right handed world, even little things like the touch point for Oyster cards being on the right of tube barriers is a pain, and I bet the designer was right handed and never even gave a thought about it. And don't get me started on corkscrews, tin openers, scissors etc :mad::nono:

But we smile and get on with it :)

I suppose for yourself you can at least get left handed corkscrews, tin openers, scissors. My old man even gets a left handed cheque book.
 
I'm colourblind, red/green to be specific though that means I struggle with non-primary colours that include these colours eg blue v purple, and whilst I cannot say its comparable to being in a wheelchair etc it does annoy me how so many people and companies don't consider how a little change in their processes could make my life so much easier.

Take an item of clothing I was looking at the other day, it's colour was "apple". Now apples come in both red and green colour but by simply calling it apple I cannot distinguish which of the two it is. If you're in a store and ask someone then half the time they give you a very odd look even though you've explained your colourblind or if its online then you've the pain of having to email or find someone else to look at the photo. The other day when asking a company what something was (Googling the name of the colour used said it was a fruit that can be blue or purple) and they replied it was a "blueberry" colour, I replied saying "so you mean its purple then?" and they gave a slightly snotty "yes, that's why we said blueberry".

Then at work rather than putting a status field on rows of data people decide to colour code the rows instead so most the time I know things are going really well (green) or really badly (red) but I'm just not sure which.

So......

1) Please be considerate :(

2) Any other minor disabilities out there which minor adjustments could make your life so much easier?

I can relate to colour coded spreadsheet rows. Drives me nuts. I'm not colour blind but a database is. When I load that spreadsheet in to SQL Server, I can't write queries to only show me the rows some wingnut customer has made red or green. Presentation should not infer content. Nobody gets it.
 
I suppose for yourself you can at least get left handed corkscrews, tin openers, scissors. My old man even gets a left handed cheque book.

Yes, I do. A favourite trick is to ask a right handed friend to open the wine, and hand them the left handed corkscrew - much confusion ensues.......

Cheque books is a good point, I 'd forgotten about them as I haven't used a cheque book for ages, but yes, they were a right pain as well !
 
Do they really look the same to you? I don't mean about the red & green looking the same, I mean don't they at least appear a different shade from each other?

I agree that people's knowledge of the situation is useless as my own question shows :(
 
But is this 'discrimination' or just an annoyance?
I am sure everyone in the UK has got something that they struggle with because another person has done it in a different way. That does not mean it's discrimination.
If I wanted to employ OP but upon realising he was colour blind, then changed my mind, that would not be allowed. But if the job entailed needing to be able to distinguish between colours, then where do we stand? The discrimination in that case is justified.
 
Do they really look the same to you? I don't mean about the red & green looking the same, I mean don't they at least appear a different shade from each other?
Yes and "that doesn't help".

So if we take red/green status then with most people's choice of colours I can see that there are two groups because of the different shades but that doesn't help me know which group is the red group or which is the green group.

There are also some cases where the "shade" is almost identical but the colour is different and so I cannot distinguish them but colour sighted people can. This is how the colour dot circles used to identify colourblindness work otherwise I'd still be able to ultimately see the letter/number/shape by joining the shades as per:

What I see:
RGblind.jpg

What the rest of the world sees:
normal.jpg

PS: I may have gotten these the wrong way round (obv part of the problem) as they look the same to me
 
But is this 'discrimination' or just an annoyance?
I use discrimination to be emotive but its meant more tongue in cheek

Similarly the Disability Discrimination Act used to require "reasonable adjustment" so again tongue in cheek I'd argue that by not having a status field was a failure to make reasonable adjustment for my disability
 
Wow I had no idea! I always consider it a minor issue that outside of wiring had little real world applications :blush:
 
A friend of mine won some entrepreneur type awards to fund a colour blind app which would adjust your monitor/phone to your own flavour of colour blindness (there are many) and adjust it. This was quite a few years ago - can't remember what happened to it in the end. Do these exist yet? :)
 
E.g. can you hold up your phone and get a colour-corrected view through the camera, to resolve images like the above?
 
I can top that, I'm a dyslexic left hander!
 
Wow I had no idea! I always consider it a minor issue that outside of wiring had little real world applications :blush:

Depends how careful you are. I make sure I don't buy purple ties/pocket squares etc otherwise I end up dressing with fairly odd colour combinations. In my job I normally can dictate how reports etc look so ensure they don't rely on colour alone but when new in to a job it means having to get people to adopt a new template etc.

A friend of mine won some entrepreneur type awards to fund a colour blind app which would adjust your monitor/phone to your own flavour of colour blindness (there are many) and adjust it. This was quite a few years ago - can't remember what happened to it in the end. Do these exist yet? :)
There are plenty of apps that will enable coloursighted people see the world as a colourblind person.

I've not seen apps that do the reverse but know there are a pair of glasses that does this with about 95% success rate.

There are photos of a Christmas tree that's been made red/green colourblind and almost everyone says "Christmas must be so boring for you" and the Mrs wanted me to get a pair of the glasses so I can see how colourful it really is (and so champagne doesn't look like "swamp water" or so she doesn't look "green") but for me ignorance is bliss in this case. I don't want to wear glasses all the time (esp with how they looked) and my wife doesn't look green to me but maybe if I wore the glasses and took them off then she would look ill all the time afterwards.
 
I have 6:20 vision (amblyopia). I listed it as a disability when applying for a job. The employer (local authority) subsequently telephoned. Although they were obligated to interview potential employees with disabilities, they told me upfront that I wouldn't get the job. It was up to me if I wanted the interview experience, but otherwise I would be wasting my time.
 
I have 6:20 vision (amblyopia). I listed it as a disability when applying for a job. The employer (local authority) subsequently telephoned. Although they were obligated to interview potential employees with disabilities, they told me upfront that I wouldn't get the job. It was up to me if I wanted the interview experience, but otherwise I would be wasting my time.

Surely that is a better approach than going through the motions just to satisfy legislation, and thereby completely wasting your time?

I think we have too much stressing about "discrimination" nowadays, it has become a pejorative term rather than a neutral adverb. For example, although I 'm sure this wasn't the case in your example, but if someone with a vision disability applied for a driving job, the employer would be obligated on health and safety grounds to "discriminate" against that applicant.
 
I have a mild case of Dyslexia - mostly with numbers but also spelling (for a long while I couldn't spell 'maybe' at all - I put 'mabye' and could see it was wrong, but wouldn't know how to fix it). I don't suffer many 'discriminations' other than a few sniggers when I can't see what everyone else obviously can.

Where I do suffer is entering in arbitrary codes (e.g. telephone numbers!) by the time I am half way through I have no idea what comes next and they all become interchangeable. I only made a Virgin train once by the skin of my teeth as I had to enter a ten digit code to get my ticket but I really struggled - made even worse as the genus owner of the system thought it would be fun for a code to have lots of 8 and B characters and S and 5 characters, and terminal type font where they were barely distinguishable :mad:
 
I have a mild case of Dyslexia - mostly with numbers but also spelling (for a long while I couldn't spell 'maybe' at all - I put 'mabye' and could see it was wrong, but wouldn't know how to fix it). I don't suffer many 'discriminations' other than a few sniggers when I can't see what everyone else obviously can.

Where I do suffer is entering in arbitrary codes (e.g. telephone numbers!) by the time I am half way through I have no idea what comes next and they all become interchangeable. I only made a Virgin train once by the skin of my teeth as I had to enter a ten digit code to get my ticket but I really struggled - made even worse as the genus owner of the system thought it would be fun for a code to have lots of 8 and B characters and S and 5 characters, and terminal type font where they were barely distinguishable :mad:

I can see how that would be annoying. I always hate codes that contain "O" and "0"s. I mean, how the :censored::censored::censored: are you supposed to tell the difference? I never can, just have to guess and use trial and error :mad:
 
I think we have too much stressing about "discrimination" nowadays, it has become a pejorative term rather than a neutral adverb. For example, although I 'm sure this wasn't the case in your example, but if someone with a vision disability applied for a driving job, the employer would be obligated on health and safety grounds to "discriminate" against that applicant.

But under the legal definition of discrimination it has to be unjustified and so saying a blind person cannot get an interview for a job driving a HGV is not discrimination.

There are some protected characteristics that you cannot differentiate people on even if there is justification (or at least need a massively stronger case than normal). So a company looking for a porter cannot specify they only want male candidates because blokes generally are stronger than women and get pregnant less often as whilst this statement is justifiable its a protected characteristic and as such the "average" doesn't meet the threashold.
 
Surely that is a better approach than going through the motions just to satisfy legislation, and thereby completely wasting your time?

Are you kidding!?

Their attitude towards me was completely contrary to the Equality Act 2010. On that basis, the Equality Act 2010 isn't worth the paper it's written on.
 

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