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posted by chromas on Monday October 29 2018, @07:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-the-internet-said-it-was-a-miracle dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Scientists debunk the effectiveness of EnChroma glasses for colorblind people

The recent commercialization of the EnChroma glasses has generated great expectations among the color blind thanks to a strong campaign on social networks and the media. Users of the glasses hoped to see new colors or even correct their color blindness.

The North American manufacturer advertises an improvement in color vision for certain types of color blindness, protan and deutan, by extending the range of colors users perceive without affecting the colors that are already distinguished without glasses. In fact, on its website, EnChroma states that their glasses "alleviate red-green color blindness, enhancing colors without the compromise of color accuracy," but say that their glasses "may not work" for severe red-green deficiency.

[...] In an article published in Optics Express, researchers from the University of Granada (UGR) have debunked the effectiveness of these glasses for color vision deficiency (CVD), proving that the EnChroma glasses don't make color blind people's vision comparable to that of people without color blindness.

This UGR research involved 48 people with color blindness, after a public call to which more than 200 volunteers responded. The researchers used two complementary strategies to evaluate the effectiveness of the glasses. The first strategy consisted of evaluating the color vision of the participants with and without glasses using different types of tests: the Ishihara test (recognition) and the Fansworth-Munsell test (arrangement). Additionally, they used a test based on the X-Rite Color Chart, which evaluates subjective color naming.

The second approach for evaluating the effectiveness of the glasses consisted of using the spectral transmittance of the lenses to simulate different observers, which allowed the researchers to evaluate the changes in color appearance.

[...] This study carried out by the UGR shows that a color-blind person using the EnChroma glasses will not perceive new colors, but rather sees the same colors in a different way.

"This makes it possible for some individuals using these glasses to distinguish some colors, but to the detriment of others, which will be now confused. Even though a color filter such as that used by the EnChroma glasses may change the appearance of colors, it will never make color vision more similar to a normal observer's vision," the authors state.

[...] Additionally, during the research, the observers were asked to look at their surroundings with the glasses and to subjectively assess the possible improvement. None of the participants noticed any improvement to the colors of their surroundings when looking through the glasses, except for one female participant with very mild deuteranomaly.

The results show that the glasses specifically used in this study don[sic not confer any improvement in the recognition or arrangement color blindness tests. Therefore, the glasses cannot improve scores in professional screening tests, contrary to what the company claims on its website.

L. Gómez-Robledo et al, Do EnChroma glasses improve color vision for colorblind subjects?, Optics Express (2018) (open, DOI: 10.1364/OE.26.028693)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @10:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @10:34PM (#755389)

    That's the thing. None of those look any different.