There are a few everyday situations that 24-year-old Mason Julie struggles in. He can’t always read graphs, charts or maps very well. The red squiggly line that alerts you to spelling mistakes looks different to him. Selecting pencil color or clothes is always a gamble, as is trying to pick sufficiently ripened fruit at the supermarket.
Like around one in 12 men and one in 200 women, Julie has red-green color-blindness – or, more accurately, is color vision deficient – which makes it hard to tell the difference between some hues and reduces the overall number of color he can see. Today, though, his eyesight is undergoing a temporary but radical transformation.
Inside Sydney University’s Cham Wing Museum, Julie is trying on a pair of vision-enhancing glasses that promise to help him see in a fuller range of color. What was once a dull gray will be revealed as blush pink. Details that were previously too blurry to make out in a painting – individual floorboards, the sharpness around a rock – come into focus.
“The water and the necklace are completely different with the glasses on,” he tells Guardian Australia, inspecting an 1881 work by Nicholas Chevalier called South Sea Beauty, in which a woman reclines in a boat. Julie calmly slides the glasses up and down his nose, comparing the view through the lenses and without them. “The water looks very different – it becomes a cooler color, but also more vibrant. The trees stand out more. Without the glasses, it all kind of blends together.”
Usually, paintings like this would appear to Julie in a duller range of shades, reducing their detail. But with the glasses on, hues sharpen and pop, and objects become more defined. For someone who usually only sees 1% of the normal range of color, this is a novel experience.
“It’s weird,” he laughs. When you’re used to seeing color a certain way, Julie says, the sudden change can feel discomforting. “It’s kind of easier to stick with what you know.”
He also wonders how much he can believe his own eyes.
“I’m not sure [the painting] is the ‘right’ color that normal people see, but it’s different,” he says. “For me, the grass is green, but I don’t know how that color looks to anybody else. Whether I’m seeing it as a completely different color, I’m never completely sure.”
Cham Wing Museum recently became the first museum or gallery in Australia to offer color-correcting glasses to guests like Julie, introducing them free of charge from April.
“I think especially in cultural and arts institutions, accessibility needs to be key,” says Jane Thogersen, a curator at the museum. “[These glasses] allow people with color-blindness to experience the museum and the exhibitions as they are intended. And it’s such an easy way to do it.”
The glasses, which are created by a US company called Chroma, are part of a mounting wave of tech innovations aimed at improving vision for those with color-blindness. Recent years have seen small but significant advances – like Apple allowing users to navigate their iPhones with corrective color filters, or video games such as Grand Theft Auto introducing color-blind modes.
But not every color-blind person will benefit from popping on a pair of spectacles. Chroma says that their glasses are effective for eight in 10 people with red-green color-blindness but won’t work at all for those with the less common blue-yellow color-blindness, or the very rare total color-blindness. Price could be another barrier: the glasses retail for between $299 and $514 a pop, with different pairs required for indoors and outdoors.
“Seeing the color difference is a massive change. It looks a lot better,” he says. “But it’s not like those reaction videos of people where they see something for the first time and start crying.”
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